By Charlotte Rooney

The behaviours that made you an exceptional individual contributor are precisely what’s preventing you from scaling your impact as a leader. By identifying and shifting three specific traits you can improve both team performance and your work-life balance.

Most people get promoted to management based on their excellent performance as individual contributors, yet 82% of them don’t receive any training in how to manage people or lead teams. This doesn’t always improve with time. 26% of senior managers report having received no training either (CMI 2023). This is all despite research showing that organisations that invest in management and leadership development see, on average, a 23% increase in performance and a 32% increase in employee engagement and productivity.

Unfortunately, the behaviours that made you excellent as a team member can become liabilities as a leader, particularly the higher up the ladder you climb. In the words of Marshall Goldsmith “What got you here, won’t get you there.”

Apart from lobbying your workplace for leadership training or investing in your own leadership development support, what can you do to improve your performance as a leader, and through that, your team’s profitability?

You can start by being aware of and learning to manage three very common tendencies among high achievers who become leaders so that you can lead happy, motivated and engaged teams (without working 60+ hours a week!)

They are:

Being the default problem solver
Perfectionism and excessively high standards
Trying to keep everyone happy

Being the Default Problem Solver

Scanning through the team inbox you notice an angry email directed at one of your team. The Head of Sales wasn’t happy with the advice he received from your HRBP on how to handle a tricky performance issue with someone just back from maternity leave. You open the email, even though it’s not addressed to you. It’s pretty harsh and without hesitating you immediately start crafting a response, defending your team member.

Half an hour later you hit send, satisfied that you’ve dodged a bullet and put out that fire before it got out of hand.

Sound familiar?

As a conscientious high achiever, you pride yourself on getting things done quickly and effectively. Now that you manage a team, you see your role as the person who needs to make your team’s life easier. And what could be more helpful than solving the problems that are in their way?

Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Even in a situation like that one, jumping in to solve all the problems your team faces isn’t actually doing them any favours.

There’s no nice way to say this – but that behaviour is micromanagement.

Why? Because you’re creating an environment where people don’t have to learn to solve issues themselves. They don’t get a chance to grow by doing hard things, which encourages a pattern of learned helplessness.

The most insidious part? It feels productive and helpful. But while you’re busy putting out fires that you should let your team handle, your true responsibilities as a manager are going unfulfilled.

Perfectionism and excessively high standards

Even if you’re not the kind of perfectionist who spends hours rewriting every email to get the tone just right, your leadership may still be suffering. Having strong attention to detail and commitment to excellence earned you this leadership position. But now those same perfectionist tendencies might be stifling your team’s growth and your success.

You might question what’s wrong with having high standards as excellence is what you strive for. Consider how much time you spend each week:

Redoing tasks that weren’t quite perfect
Making minor adjustments to team members’ work
Following up on detailed corrections

However much time it is, it’s a waste. The value you’re adding in comparison to what you could be adding with that same time, is very low.

Perfectionism leads to procrastination. Rather than do a poor job, you avoid doing any job at all so that you can’t underperform. You believe that it’s better not to start than to do it badly.

The opposite of this is that you choose to do everything yourself because you believe that you will do it better and faster than anyone you might delegate to. Just like being the default problem solver, that demotivates your team and means work-life balance is a distant dream as you take on the work other people should be doing.

Finally, perfectionism also makes you a bottleneck in every process where you insist on final sign-off. It discourages your team from developing the skills and experience they need to be standalone and reduces the chance of innovation and creativity if everything has to be done the way you would do it or if it’s “not good enough”.

Trying to keep everyone happy

An unexpected emergency occurs and you need to pivot to deal with it. But, senior leadership don’t want you to de-prioritise anything from your existing work plan. You know that your team can’t do both. Instead of telling the CEO that, you agree that you’ll figure it out and handle the emergency while also delivering the full project load.

You tell your team the news, sympathising with their frustration while insisting it has to be done. Later that evening you’re still at your desk, trying to figure out how to make it all work without burning anyone out, including yourself.

The final and most pervasive management trait that I see holding women back is a desire to keep everyone happy. Whether that shows up like the story above, or as repeatedly reworking the schedule to accommodate one person, or avoiding a difficult conversation about someone’s performance because you know they’re having a hard time outside of work. Trying to keep everyone happy usually ends up with everyone feeling short-changed.

You think that you’re doing the right thing by trying to find the best solution for everyone. But more often than not you don’t find any solution at all, because someone is always unhappy, so you have to go back and adjust your decision.

Your authority as a leader is undermined when you avoid conflict. As Kim Scott points out in her book Radical Candor, avoiding difficult conversations because we’re trying to protect people’s feelings never ends well. It might keep the person involved happy while they maintain the illusion that they’re doing well, but it puts everyone else in the team in a place of feeling disillusioned and unsupported.

Conclusion

If you want to be the most productive leader you can be and lead a highly profitable team, start by tackling those three traits.

Build trust in your team’s ability to solve problems themselves and that they can and will bring you in when necessary. You’re a great problem solver, so whenever they do bring you in, trust that you will be able to help.

Secondly, evaluate your criteria for success carefully so that you can accept “good enough” and “done differently to how I would have done it, but it works”. While you can tweak things endlessly the return on your time diminishes quickly.

Finally, recall Jeffrey Pfeffer’s advice in 7 Rules of Power. You weren’t hired to win a popularity contest, you were hired as a leader to get things done. And sometimes that means making a decision that not everyone likes because it is what needs to be done.

About the author

Charlotte Rooney is a Career Coach and Work-Life Balance Strategist for busy women and the Founder of A Half Managed Mind.