Perhaps we sometimes borrow our confidence from other people

I recently had a knee replacement and, before going into hospital, I spent far more time thinking about the professional implications than the physical ones. How long would I actually be “out of it” for? What would happen if someone really needed something? Would an opportunity be overlooked because I hadn’t seen it? Would projects stall because I wasn’t watching?

I reassured myself that I have very capable people working alongside me and, in any event, my work is mobile. My laptop would be right next to me after surgery.

I clearly had a somewhat optimistic view of what “after surgery” would look like.

For several days, work was simply not an option. But as I started coming partially back online, I noticed something interesting. Most things had carried on without me. People had made decisions, solved problems and kept things moving. There were, however, some things that hadn’t moved quite as easily, and the difference didn’t seem to be capability.

That started me thinking about the relationship between identity and role performance. More specifically, what happens when doing a good job becomes knowing that someone else thinks you did a good job?

When reassurance becomes part of the work

I’ve spent years encouraging the people who work with me to make decisions. Our philosophy around mistakes is fairly simple: learn from them, don’t spend your life trying to avoid them. If we never get anything wrong, we’re probably not stretching ourselves very far.

And yet I have noticed something that doesn’t entirely disappear simply because a leader says, “I trust you.”

An email is drafted but needs to be checked before it is sent. A task is completed but needs someone to confirm that it is right. A decision could reasonably be made but is brought upwards for approval anyway. Individually, these things can look like conscientiousness. Repeated often enough, however, two people effectively start doing one person’s work.

I used to think this was mostly about fear of making mistakes. But that explanation has never quite satisfied me, particularly because I see the pattern in environments where people are encouraged to make decisions and mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn.

Perhaps the reassurance isn’t only about the work. Perhaps it is also about the self.

Many of us derive at least some sense of who we are from what we do professionally. We feel capable because we perform well, valued because our contribution matters and confident because there is evidence that we know what we are doing.

But what happens when that evidence comes increasingly from another person confirming that we have done it correctly?

Research into organisation-based self-esteem suggests that the relationship between our work and our sense of self can be considerably more intertwined than we consciously realise. Research on self-determination and autonomy at work adds another dimension: the importance of developing genuine autonomy and competence rather than relying on external confirmation.

But what if the leader is part of the pattern?

This is where the question became more uncomfortable for me.

If someone continually brings their work to me for checking, perhaps they haven’t yet learned to trust their own judgement. But I also have to ask whether, somewhere along the way, I have inadvertently taught them not to.

I can tell someone that I trust them to make decisions, but if I then routinely catch the mistake, rewrite the email, improve the wording, refine the idea or provide final approval, there may be another message underneath the one I think I am sending: “I trust you to do this. But don’t worry, I’ll make sure it’s right.”

Perhaps dependence isn’t always something only one person brings into a relationship. Sometimes it becomes a system that two people unconsciously create together.

The person being managed gets the reassurance of knowing there is a safety net. The leader gets the reassurance of knowing things are being done correctly. Both feel safer, but neither necessarily grows.

The person making the decision doesn’t experience the full cycle of using judgement, making the decision, living with the outcome, reflecting on it and adjusting next time. Meanwhile, the leader remains so deeply embedded in everybody else’s decisions that their own capacity slowly disappears under other people’s work.

Becoming less necessary

Which brings me back to my knee replacement.

Before I went into hospital, the question worrying me was: what happens if people need me and I’m not available?

Afterwards, I found myself wondering whether the more useful leadership question might be: what happens if they don’t?

Surely one measure of successful leadership is that the people around us become progressively less dependent on us for the decisions that belong within their roles.

There is an identity question for the leader here too. Being needed can feel rather good. We become the person who knows, the person who fixes, the person who catches what everyone else missed and the person whose judgement people seek.

Perhaps the person being led isn’t the only one who has to become comfortable with greater independence. The leader has to become comfortable with becoming less necessary.

That may be considerably harder than saying, “I empower my people.”

For me, this is where leadership development and leadership identity become inseparable. Developing judgement requires opportunities to use it before it is perfect. It means making decisions, experiencing their consequences and having the chance to learn from them. That is as relevant to the entrepreneur building a business as it is to someone taking on their first leadership responsibility.

And for those of us doing the leading, it may occasionally mean knowing the answer and choosing not to provide it.

I am still thinking about this one. Perhaps the question is not simply whether we give people enough autonomy, but whether we give them enough opportunity to develop the internal evidence that tells them they can trust themselves.

And whether, as leaders, we are prepared to let them.