If you’re a manager, you’re a role model (whether you realise it or not)

Today, after five years of leading the Technology team at HSBC on a journey of profound transformation, our Group CIO, Darryl West, leaves the bank. We will miss him.

I’ve worked with Darryl for many years in different companies, and have learnt a lot from him, especially about leadership. It therefore seems appropriate to mark his departure by sharing one of those lessons.

This lesson came several years ago, when we both worked at another bank. I didn’t know Darryl well at that time: he was Group CIO, and I was leading architecture for an area called Central Functions (all the back office heavy lifting of the bank - operations, payments, finance, risk and so on). Darryl was holding a meeting of senior managers, and was speaking about our role in leading our teams, when he said something I had never considered before: ‘When your team members go home at night, they talk about you.’

I had never considered that before. Like many people, I had made steady progress in my career, and had taken increasingly senior positions, but I still thought of myself as just one of the team, just one of the workers. I never thought of myself as somebody that other people would talk about, especially not in a context outside work.

Darryl went on to say that, if you manage a team (or if you manage people who manage teams), then you are a subject of attention and speculation. And this should not be surprising: if you are a manager, you loom large in the lives of people you manage. If you give your people a hard time when they don’t feel it’s justified, you leave them angry and irritable. If you give your people an important and meaningful challenge, and help them understand and address that challenge, then (when you get it right) you leave them empowered and inspired.

And your impact goes beyond your formal actions as a manager: beyond allocating resources, tracking progress and managing tasks. You also affect your teams by the way you display your feelings and the way you behave. If you are grumpy and frustrated, you will transmit frustration to your team. If you are thoughtful and respectful, you will transmit thought and respect to your team. However you behave, you will determine the conversations they have about you when you are not there, and the way they feel about their jobs, your team and your company.

Darryl’s message was not that we should regard ourselves as minor celebrities, or that we should bask in the attention we imagine ourselves to receive. It was also not that we should try to adopt behaviours and styles which are unnatural to us: he was not encouraging us to be inauthentic.

His message was that all managers are role models, whether we realise it or not. We are not role models in the sense that all our behaviour should be admired: we are all human and this is often far from the case. But we are role models in the sense that our behaviour influences the behaviours of others, whether we realise it or not; we set the tone for our teams and for our organisation, whether we realise it or not.

This might seem obvious, but it evidently isn’t. Although I had been a manager for many years, I had not thought about myself in these terms until I heard Darryl say it out loud in that meeting. Once I heard it, I realised it was true, and it changed the way I thought about my job and my behaviour.

Some of the best leadership lessons are those which tell you things which you should know, but had never realised: I’m grateful to Darryl for this leadership lesson, and for the chance to work with him at HSBC.