Would You Want to Be Led by You Right Now?

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Here's an uncomfortable leadership question:

Would you want to be led by you right now?

Not six months ago.

Not when business was easier.

Not when you had more time, fewer problems and greater certainty.

Right now.

Because there's a difference between what you're carrying as a leader and what everybody else experiences because you're carrying it.

You might be dealing with declining revenue.

A difficult market.

Pressure from shareholders.

A senior person who isn't performing.

Cash flow.

Change.

Conflict.

Decisions nobody else knows you're having to make.

Those pressures are real.

But your team doesn't experience your responsibilities.

They experience your behaviour.

And sometimes the leader we believe ourselves to be is not quite the leader everyone else is currently experiencing.

We judge ourselves by context

When we're under pressure, we know the reasons behind our behaviour.

We know why we were impatient in the meeting.

We know why we haven't spoken to someone properly for two weeks.

We know why we're checking things more closely.

We know why our tolerance has shortened.

We know why we're distracted.

And because we understand the context, we naturally make allowances for ourselves.

Other people don't have access to all of that context.

• They simply experience:

• A shorter conversation.

• A frustrated response.

• Another changed priority.

• A decision being questioned.

• Less availability.

• More scrutiny.

An atmosphere that feels slightly different when you enter the room.

We judge ourselves by what we're carrying.

Other people experience us by how we carry it.

That's an important distinction.

Pressure travels

One of the things I've noticed throughout my career is that pressure rarely stays where it starts.

A board puts pressure on a director.

The director puts pressure on the leadership team.

Managers feel it.

Their teams feel it.

Before long, pressure that began somewhere else has travelled through the organisation.

Not necessarily because anyone intended it to.

It travels through behaviour.

Tone.

Urgency.

Meetings.

Emails.

Decisions.

Expectations.

The leader doesn't need to tell everyone they're worried.

People become remarkably good at detecting it.

That's why leadership under pressure requires more self-awareness, not less.

Your team may be compensating for you

This is something leaders don't always see.

Teams adapt to their leaders.

If you've become more impatient, people start choosing more carefully when to approach you.

If you've become more controlling, people stop making decisions without checking first.

If you've become less available, people solve around you.

If you react badly to challenge, people gradually stop challenging.

If priorities keep changing, people wait before committing fully to the latest one.

Eventually, the team can begin compensating for the leader's behaviour.

And from the leader's perspective, everything can still look relatively normal.

That's the danger.

Because the behaviour you most need to recognise may be the behaviour everyone around you has already learned how to accommodate.

The Leadership Mirror

A useful exercise is to temporarily stop looking at the organisation through your own eyes.

Instead, try to experience yourself from the other side of the table.

I call this the Leadership Mirror.

Ask yourself four questions.

1. What is my team currently getting more of from me?

More direction?

More scrutiny?

More urgency?

More meetings?

More challenge?

More involvement?

More emotion?

Not all of these are necessarily bad.

The question is whether they are deliberate.

2. What are they currently getting less of?

Less time?

Less patience?

Less context?

Less recognition?

Less autonomy?

Less consistency?

Less opportunity to challenge?

Pressure often changes leadership through subtraction rather than addition.

Sometimes what disappears matters as much as what appears.

3. What behaviour of mine are people having to compensate for?

This is the uncomfortable one.

Are people checking your mood before raising something?

Are they asking for approval they previously wouldn't have needed?

Are they avoiding difficult information?

Are they spending time working out which priority is actually the priority?

Are other leaders providing reassurance after you've created uncertainty?

If people are regularly compensating for a behaviour, it's worth understanding why.

4. If I reported to me right now, what would I find difficult?

Forget your title for a moment.

Imagine sitting on the other side of your desk.

Would expectations be clear?

Would you know where you stood?

Could you disagree safely?

Would you receive enough context?

Would good work be recognised?

Would you know what really mattered?

Would you trust that today's priority would still matter tomorrow?

And ultimately:

Would you want to be led by you right now?

This isn't about beating yourself up

The purpose of the Leadership Mirror isn't self-criticism.

Leadership is difficult.

Sometimes exceptionally difficult.

And nobody leads perfectly through prolonged pressure.

The objective is simply to notice when circumstances have created a gap between your intentions and your impact.

Because once you can see the gap, you can do something about it.

Perhaps you need to communicate more.

Perhaps you've become too involved.

Perhaps a difficult conversation you've been carrying is affecting unrelated conversations.

Perhaps your team needs more context about what is happening.

Perhaps you simply need to acknowledge:

"I've been under pressure recently and I don't think I've been showing up in the way I expect of myself."

There is considerable strength in a leader being able to recognise that.

Your behaviour gives people permission

There's another reason this matters.

Leaders don't simply influence how people feel.

They influence what people believe is acceptable.

If you become visibly reactive, reactivity becomes easier for others.

If you compromise standards because you're busy, others learn that pressure changes standards.

If you treat people poorly because you're stressed, stress becomes an explanation for poor behaviour.

But the opposite is also true.

When people see a leader remain measured during uncertainty, they learn something.

When they see disagreement handled without hostility, they learn something.

When they see somebody acknowledge a mistake without becoming defensive, they learn something.

When they see standards remain consistent despite pressure, they learn something.

Your behaviour is always teaching people something about leadership.

The question is whether it's teaching what you intended.

The Versed perspective

There is a particular challenge with senior leadership.

The more responsibility you carry, the fewer people there may be who are prepared to hold the mirror up.

People see the pressure you're under.

They understand you're busy.

They know the stakes.

And sometimes that means behaviours that would once have been challenged simply aren't.

That's one of the reasons independent perspective matters.

Not because somebody outside the organisation knows your business better than you do.

They don't.

But they can ask questions without carrying the politics, assumptions and familiarity that exist inside it.

Sometimes the most useful question isn't:

"What should you do?"

It's:

"What are other people experiencing from you right now?"

That can change the entire conversation.

Final thought

Leadership isn't judged by the pressure you're carrying.

It's experienced through what happens to everyone around you while you carry it.

So occasionally, step outside yourself.

Ask:

What are people getting more of from me?

What are they getting less of?

What are they having to compensate for?

And:

If I reported to me right now, what would I find difficult?

Then ask the question that matters:

Would I want to be led by me right now?

You don't need to like every answer.

You just need to be prepared to do something with it.