They fail to deputize anyone to be ambassadors for their successes

Have you ever been frustrated by leaders or people who rank higher in your company not understanding the emotional intelligence consequences of their decisions or how they communicate to the group? Unfortunately, most of my experience and observations state that this is a pretty commonplace occurrence. I'd like to dive into the ethos of that a bit in the following. I think that it's important to understand the psyche of the people who may be bothering you with their behavior so that you might better manage how you react to and interact with those people.

Let's start with entrepreneurs and executive-level folks because they have the burden of position and are therefore the easiest to target with analysis. For these people, in many cases, work is life and business is passion. It may be that you do not share their passion and that you would rather prioritize your time on family, sport, or a hobby that you really like. Probably work is just a means to an end for you. This might seem insane, but you're essentially personally offending executives and entrepreneurs because so damn many of them can't understand what it's like to not live for work. Work is their life. You don't want to work 24/7? You're offensive because you don't support their life. It doesn't matter that it's not your intention to be this way; you just are.

So what do you do if you're in this situation? How do you manage this relationship? Because their work is their passion, you need to show a certain level of commitment to these folks. I was a bit heavy-handed in the last paragraph but realistically a demonstrable level of effort and passion will shield you from the ire of this personality type because most could see and appreciate it. Some may not and that's okay. This is more or less a strategy to manage to 85%+ of scenarios. To be clear, I'm suggesting that you need to be performative in how you communicate with this group of people if work is not your passion in life. The reason I'm suggesting this is because it will result in less conflict for you at work and make your days easier.

Please don't assume I'm saying, "Don't stand up for yourself if you should," or, "Compromise your ideals to placate these people." That's not what I mean. You'll know if you end up in an untenable environment. It's happened to me and it will likely happen to you if it hasn't already.

This type of thing isn't limited to C-suite and business owners. You can find many pockets of such behavior among other levels of leadership for a variety of reasons.

Maybe you're seeing this kind of thing from a new manager. And guess what? A new manager might be like you but the reason they're behaving this way might be because they are struggling or are uncertain what is expected of them. This would cause them to redirect some of that pressure your way as a direct report just to make sure there are no problems. Believe me, it takes a while to get a handle on managing people effectively. I think if you're in this type of situation or something similar to it that there is a possibility of an exchange of ideas and a negotiation because there's a lot more common ground. Therefore, my suggestion would be to have that tough talk with this person and hash out what you're seeing. And like I've said so many times before, if you're finding those talks are not productive than you have great information you did not have before (people quit managers more than they tend to quit companies).

I've been hovering around today's topic in prior posts and would like to acknowledge for a moment that these approaches will differ quite a bit depending on what industry you're in. That's mostly why I've been trying to give universal advice rather than telling you to say or ask about specific things. Construction is obviously going to be very different from the IT space and they are culturally distinct. So yes, massage advice so that it fits your culture and if something I'm saying wouldn't apply because of your culture then just don't do it. I would never want you to employ anything here and make your life harder as a result. I trust your judgment.

I've noticed a big common problem for the types of people we've been analyzing in this post: They fail to deputize anyone to be ambassadors for their successes. If you're a people-leader or someone high-up who is reading this I just have one piece of broad advice for you on this topic: You've got to give the people who work for you a reason to care about what they're doing and it can't be money or something that you care about because your personal stakes are inherently different than those who work below you and money only works until it doesn't (that's not me expressing an opinion that people shouldn't ask for more money or get paid more, by the way; it's an admission that money is not the strongest motivator from an org behavior point of view). Relatability and understanding are probably the two areas that executive level people are most frequently deficient in.

The point today is to teach everyone how they might begin to be bridges in these situations. I hope this gives you some extra confidence in handling different personality types.

(No sources today because this is more of an opinion blog from my point of view)