Why You May Not Be As Good of a Leader as You Think You Are (Episode 31)

Transcript

You may not be as good of a leader as you think you are. It’s just true. Now I’m not saying you are a bad person or that you’re not trying to be a great leader.

It’s just that there’s factors out there that could be affecting you that’s keeping you from being a great leader and you just don’t know it.

What are these factors? Let’s find out.

1.      You are in the Dunning-Kruger Club

First, there’s the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is sometimes called the armchair quarterback syndrome. The Dunning-Kruger effect basically states that the less you know about something, the more confident you are about what you think you know.

Now let’s look at leadership through this lens. Have you ever noticed that no one thinks they’re a bad leader?

I want you to think about your worst boss ever. Did they think they were a bad leader? No. Basically everyone out there thinks they are a great leader and the large part of it is because of the Dun and Kruger effect.

It’s the danger of a little knowledge. You know a little bit about something and you think you know it all. It’s like me learning to play guitar and I learn a few chords and I think I know guitar but I really don’t. There’s so much more for me to learn. And that’s where a lot of leaders get stuck.They think they’ve got it.

And what’s worse is when people get into the position of a boss, a manager, a leader, they think because they are in that position they know what leadership is. And they might be even overly confident and a little arrogant about what they think they know when they don’t.

So we all need to be careful about the Dunning-Kruger effect to make sure we’re not part of the club because as David Dunning said, “The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger Club is that you don’t know you’re in the Dunning-Kruger Club.”

But we also need to understand that leadership isn’t just one thing you learn one time and that’s it. Leadership is like any other skill you can learn. If you want to get good at guitar, you have to practice and practice and practice. If you want to get good at soccer or football, you have to spend the time learning it, learning the principles and practice. It’s not a one-time thing.

2.      You’ve been taught the wrong stuff

What makes the Dunning-Kruger effect worse is our reason number two, that there’s so much misinformation and confusion about leadership out there.

If you look at all the blogs and articles and videos and the memes and everything that’s out there, LinkedIn, oh my goodness, there’s so much out there that’s just not true. There’s some that’s superficial, some’s just based on conventional wisdom, and like most conventional wisdom, it’s often wrong.

If you follow conventional wisdom and if you follow what much is out there, then you’re not going to be effective as a leader. What’s worse is when people start getting trained based off this conventional wisdom. They get trained based off these things that aren’t true or because of the confusion about leadership and management and being a boss.

They don’t even get trained on what it means to be a leader or the principles of leadership; they just get trained on their duties of whatever position they’re in.

You see, one of the biggest confusions about leadership today is that people think leadership is based on you or about you, and it’s not. It’s about you being what you need to be for your team. It’s based on principles, not your preferences and styles.

So, you may not be as good of a leader or manager or boss as you think you are because of the Dunning-Kruger effect and because maybe what you have learned is just not true. You’ve just been taught wrong.

3.      You base leadership on what you’ve seen

On top of that, our reason number three is that what you think good leadership is, is based on what you’ve seen, and you just haven’t seen good leadership. Let me explain.

Let’s say you grew up eating grass. That’s all you ever had. You just ate grass for breakfast, lunch, supper. You ate grass.

And you learned what grass was good and what grass wasn’t. You learned that the skinny grass is stringy, that the thick grass is juicy, and oh, that yellow flower grass, it’s the best.

Now let’s just say I come to you one day and say, “Hey you, do you know what good food tastes like?” What would you say?

You’ll say yes. Because relative to all you know, you think the yellow grass is delicious. It is the best. You think you know what good food tastes like.

But you don’t because you’ve never experienced anything better. You’ve never had Thai food for one, which is so good.

When it comes to leadership, you may have spent your whole life around bad bosses and maybe mediocre bosses. And so when you look at what good leadership is, you think mediocre leadership is good leadership because that’s the best you’ve ever seen. You’ve never experienced great leadership to know what great leadership looks like.

And then if you model your leadership off the mediocre leadership you’ve seen because you think that’s good, then that’s just going to make you a mediocre leader. So, you may not be as good of a leader as you think you are because the best you’ve seen isn’t that good.

4.      You have the wrong motive

And our fourth reason is that you may have the wrong motive. You see, Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Motive, says we have two possible motives, a selfish and a service motive.

Now, many people see leadership as something that’s selfish, that’s about them. They see it as for the rewards. the perks, the money, the parking spots, the corner office, the prestige, the respect.

They may think it as a reward for all their hard work. It may be about them accelerating their career. It’s about them.

And when you have that mentality, you’re often not going to do the hard work that’s required of a leader because it’s not about the team, it’s not about the mission, it’s about you. And the decisions you make and everything you do is going to revolve around you.

And you’ll also have less influence with people because people will see that you’re putting yourself first.

But the other motive is a service motive. You’re not about yourself putting yourself first. You’re about putting the mission first and the team and you serving your team for them to be their best and doing the hard work of leadership so that you can accomplish the mission.

You’re not about yourself. You’re about serving the mission and the team. So my question for you is what’s your motive?

Because if it’s a selfish motive, you’re never really going to be a great leader. It needs to be one of service.