Management Is A Battle With Yourself
One of the most important insights about management is that managing your own psychology is just as important as managing your team.
Good management often requires doing things that run directly counter to human nature:
Taking power away from effective leaders because of a restructuring
Letting go of people you like, or even referred
Hiring people who are better than you
Killing a product your team loves
Making decisions that many people won’t like
These actions conflict with our instinctual need for belonging, status, and harmony. We mostly just want to get along.
The real job of a leader is to rise above those instincts and ask: What do I actually think about this situation, and what is best for the company? Answering that question is hard. Acting on it is harder. But leaders who can’t do this create chaos. A leader’s inability to do the right, uncomfortable thing may be the single biggest source of dysfunction inside companies.
One useful practice is to write down two answers in difficult moments:
What you want to do based on human instinct
What you would do if you set instinct aside and focused only on what’s right for the company
The gap between those two answers is the definition of value creation in leadership. The bigger the gap, the more value being created.
With practice, this gets easier. And over time, you’ll find that your first instinct starts to align with the right answer.
