Stop Performing Leadership. Start Practising It.

Most people assume this is a confidence issue and I understand why, because it certainly feels like confidence. But confidence is an internal weather system and you can't instruct it, whereas presence is a setting, and settings can be chosen.

The question underneath ‘presence’ is simply what version of me do people get. If the answer is a polished one, mostly, but they can't quite predict which day, then people will manage you. They'll time their approaches, and they'll bring you problems only once those problems have been tidied up, which means they'll bring them late. If the answer is the same one consistently, including the version that says I don't know, then people bring you things early, and early problems are the cheap ones.

That's the commercial argument for dropping the performance, and it's a considerably stronger argument than "you'll feel better." Although you will feel better.

The other thing I'd tell ‘younger me’ is harder, and it's to separate your self-worth from your performance.

At 30 I couldn't have told you where the job stopped and I started, so a bad month didn't feel like a bad month, it felt like evidence.

But you are more than your KPIs. That sentence sounds like something on a poster in an HR corridor and I still mean it exactly as written, because if your sense of who you are moves up and down with a number that's partly determined by the weather, the exchange rate and a competitor's promotional calendar, then you've tied yourself to something that was never yours to control in the first place.

The leaders I know who are steadiest under pressure are not the ones who care least. They're the ones who care enormously about the work and have some ground to stand on that isn't the work.

What makes all of this so hard to see at the time is that performing works, and that's the trap. It got me promoted, because looking certain, being across the detail and never visibly wobbling are genuinely rewarded, especially early on, so the performance isn't irrational at all. It's a strategy that pays.

It just stops paying at some point.

Somewhere between running a function and running a business, the job quietly changes from demonstrating competence to creating the conditions in which other people can be competent, and you can't do the second thing while still doing the first, because there isn't enough of you.

Most senior leaders I meet are still running a strategy that was optimised for a role they left years ago, and not because they're slow. Because it worked, and nothing ever forced them to go back and check.

Not to be more vulnerable, and I'm certainly not asking you to open up in a leadership team meeting (unless you want to!). Something a good deal smaller than that.

The next time you don't know the answer, say so once, plainly, without the qualifying sentence you'd normally attach to soften it, and then watch what happens. What tends to happen is nothing bad, and something quite useful, because somebody else fills the gap, the conversation gets more honest, and you collect a small piece of evidence that the thing you've been protecting against doesn't actually occur.

Gather enough of those and the performance starts to look like an enormous amount of effort for very little return.

The moment I stopped performing leadership and started practising it, the job got easier and I got better at it, both at once. I'd recommend it, and I only wish it hadn't taken me quite so long.