Why we wrote a book (when we already own too many)
On unfinished leadership books, the thing we kept noticing and what happened when we turned the mirror on ourselves.
Are there leadership books somewhere in your house that you intend to finish? Or even just unread? Maybe they’re by the bed or just languishing on your extensive bookshelf?
We’d be the last people to judge you for this because between the two of us we own an alarming number of them and there are more than a few we haven’t read all the way through. We own books on strategy, culture, courage, habits and the six things that separate good organisations from great ones. We have even underlined excellent sentences in some of them (is this desecrating a book?!), stuck nice, coloured post it notes in them or made copious notes on what we thought to be really interesting or significant. But sadly, this doesn’t mean that we’ve woken up the next day behaving differently as a result.
When the idea of writing our own book first surfaced, our first, and honest, instinct was that there is no shortage of people willing to tell leaders they ought to communicate more clearly, listen more carefully and show up more authentically. However, there’s not a great deal of evidence that being told any of this changes what a leader actually does during a difficult week. Maybe there is a book in this ‘Books that really made me do things differently?’ We wondered if adding to the pile felt more like adding a third gym membership to a wallet that already contained two unused ones than creating something valuable and useful.
One idea kept nagging at us though. It wasn’t so much an idea we wanted to explain rather a pattern we have noticed. Sticky Change is twenty-two years old and that’s more than two decades of watching (and facilitating) organisations complete change programmes successfully. And sometimes, not so successfully. In the latter case, the problem wasn’t because the leaders weren’t thoughtful and capable people who genuinely cared about getting it right. Far from it, in many cases. However, the behaviour of the people around them was telling a completely different story from the one they believed or that the status report was telling…. But they weren’t always paying attention to the discrepancy.
The conversation that starts once the meeting finishes
What we noticed was that the most useful conversations often started after a meeting had officially finished. Meetings where the updates were broadly positive, with actions being completed and the deadlines largely being met. Anyone dropping in for ten minutes would have assumed everything was progressing exactly as planned.
But once the meetings ended, in corridors or in the kitchen or even in 1:1s, what we then heard was what was really going on. The doubts, the frustrations, the things nobody really wanted to say, or dared to say, while the meeting was going on.
If we had to point to the moment this book began, it was probably somewhere in those conversations.
In particular, we’d hear leaders admit, usually with some frustration, that they were not convinced any of the change was truly sticking. Sure, people attended the workshops and said the right things when asked. But the behaviours the organisation had hoped for were not being demonstrated in any consistent way. The conversations they had with their people still felt restrained and while the sense of ownership seemed to rise when senior people were in the room, it had a tendency to fade again once they left. What we were hearing and observing stopped feeling like a coincidence and started feeling like a subject we wanted to explore more … and not just in a LinkedIn post.
And what made these observations worth writing about is not that any change initiative was necessarily failing. Most of these programmes were not failing in any way that would show up on a report, but that is exactly what made them so difficult to talk about. Everybody could see that something was missing and almost nobody had the language to name it.
We wanted to write about one thing rather than everything
The book we decided to write was not the seventy-thousand-word essay on how to make change stick, partly because plenty of those already exist and partly because we are not convinced anyone finishes them. As we’ve implied, what we wanted was to look properly at one lever, the one our years of work kept highlighting, which is that a team behaves like a mirror. People adapt to what is rewarded, what is tolerated, what feels safe and what feels risky, and the behaviour a leader sees around them is very often less about people’s individual personalities and more about how everyone has learned to survive and succeed in the face of that leader’s behaviours and approach.
Once you start looking at teams this way, a lot of behaviour that has previously been frustrating begins to make far more sense. The person who never challenges anything in the meeting, the team that agrees enthusiastically and then does something else, the department that seems to have opinions everywhere except in the room where they would be useful. None of that is a personality problem. It is usually a very rational response to something people have learned about what happens when they speak, most especially how the leader responds.
The leaders we are fortunate enough to have worked with are really decent people. Sometimes, however, they created consequences they did not intend; and the gap between what they believed they were demonstrating and what their people experienced was invisible to them. That gap is not a character flaw, it is simply something they couldn’t see, without a bit of help and encouragement.
And then the book started writing about us
This is the part we did not plan for. Partway through the process we realised we were describing behaviour we had both been guilty of, which is an uncomfortable thing to notice with your co-author sitting opposite you. When we first started working together, Mary’s attention to detail drove Fiona to distraction and Fiona’s habit of wanting to move on quickly frustrated Mary enormously. It got a little emotional at times. Neither of us intended to have that effect on the other and both of us did, and it took a while before we were willing to look at what was actually going on rather than simply work around it.
Writing about the mirror turned out to be a fairly relentless reminder to keep holding one up. Despite all the years we have worked together, we do not think we have talked quite as honestly about our impact on each other as we have over the last few months, which was nowhere on the plan for the book and is probably the thing we are most grateful for.
We asked for brutal feedback, which was more daring than we realised
Having written a book that asks leaders to invite honest reflections about themselves, it would have been slightly awkward to publish it without doing the same. So, we assembled a team of reviewers and asked them to be genuinely critical rather than kind, and they obliged. We asked our reviewers to give us a score out of 10; let’s just say it took some time to get to 8s and 9s! But the book is much stronger for their suggested revisions, and we are delighted that there were even a few 10s!
What we hope happens next – It’s out this Autumn
Very simply, that you want to read it. That you are sufficiently intrigued and curious about what it might say. That you read it to the end! But most importantly, that it makes a difference for you: in either your thinking, your approach or even your actions in the future. So, we will leave you with one question to ponder on in the meantime:
What might your team be showing you about yourself that you would rather not see?
Your Team is Your Mirror by Mary Clarke and Fiona Cameron is published this Autumn. In the meantime, The Sticky Change Sense Check is a free, ten-question tool designed to help senior leaders, HR and OD professionals see clearly where their change energy is well-channelled and where it needs attention.
Comments