Leadership Funeral to Leadership Transformation: Linda's Story
A few years ago, I was invited to my executive coaching client Linda’s funeral. After the ceremony was over, the crowd gathered at a nice restaurant downtown for the reception. I was impressed by the number of people present. Aside from immediate family, many friends and her whole team from work was there. It was a lighthearted celebration, and jokes were flying left and right. All of a sudden, Linda yelled: “Thank God, it’s all gone!”
As you gathered, this was not your average funeral. This was Linda’s leadership funeral. Fortunately, we did not bury Linda – she was very much alive! Instead, we buried some of Linda’s leadership traits that had served her well in the past but had stopped being useful to her. Linda first started out as an analyst. And she was stellar. She was detail-oriented, knew all the facts, and worked superbly independently, so of course, she got rapidly promoted and in no time was in charge of a whole department of 50+ people. But being a boss did not come naturally to Linda.
Because of her strengths as an analyst, she tended to get lost in the details of her people’s jobs and often micromanaged them. She would attempt to delegate but would then not trust her team to do a good job and take parts of the project back. It got so bad that most of the team was annoyed, and some were even outright angry with her at one stage or another. A few of her team members had started to leave because they could not stand working for her. This was when Linda and I started to work together.
Over the course of the next eight months, Linda did the hard and deep work of looking deep within herself with radical humility, asking herself:
What is it that makes it difficult for me to trust my team?
How can I get there?
How much is this about me verses about them?
And maybe most importantly: Do I really want to be a manager?
These were hard things to grapple with, and there were tears more than once. Linda stuck with it, though. In parallel to doing the deep introspection work, she started to solicit regular feedback and suggestions or feedforward from her colleagues on how to improve. These were hard and at times painful conversations. Again, Linda proved to be resilient and kept the regular check-ins up.
Over the eight months of our coaching engagement, Linda slowly started to turn the ship around, steadily improved (and yes, there were some slip-ups), and is now a much-improved leader. She does not only understand intellectually but has emotionally fully bought into the fact that her job NOW is to spend 80% of her time in meetings, and she needs to get things done through her people, instead of putting research reports together all on her own. She NOW takes pride in the great work her team members do and has shifted to become a strong leader/coach.
In her words: "I used to think I needed to do it all by myself and frankly did not trust anybody else to do an as good job as I could. This has 100 % shifted for me. Now I see my job as removing obstacles for my team, providing the best environment for them, and being a thought-sparring partner for them on hard projects. But my team members own their project, and I rarely get involved in the weeds.”
Like many of you, Linda needed to make the shift from doing it all herself THEN to delegating NOW. Linda’s leadership funeral was a symbolic act of letting go of what was, the THEN leadership, to make room for new possibilities, the NOW leadership.
Your Action Steps:
What might you need to bury to that has served you well in the past but might be in the way of becoming a highly effective leader going forward? Identify one thing and then bury it. (leadership funeral gathering not required 😊)
