One of your leaders delivers the work and their team is paying for it
A leader who is efficient and reliable is losing their team, and the cost has started to show.
This leader delivers. Deadlines are met, systems work, and you rarely have to chase anything. What is not happening is the people part. Their team feels processed rather than led, capable colleagues have begun to disengage, and the strength that got them promoted is now producing a cost they cannot see.
Presenting symptoms
- The work arrives on time and the people in the team are quiet.
- Colleagues raise things about this team with you rather than with its leader.
- Requests to move out of the team, or a run of departures, without an obvious cause.
Possible causes
- They may not know. Nobody has told them, because they are competent and the conversation is awkward.
- They may believe that delivering well is the whole of the job, and relationships are what happens afterwards.
- The post may carry more than one person can deliver relationally, so the shortfall is time rather than inclination.
- They may know perfectly well, and find the relational part genuinely hard.
They have no idea. Nobody has told them.
Your most useful next step: Collect something specific before the conversation, whether that is departures, a pattern in what colleagues bring to you, or what their team says when asked, and show them that rather than describing your impression.
Lead behaviours
They think relationships are what happens once the work is done.
Your most useful next step: Ask them to change one routine rather than their personality: begin their team meeting with ten minutes that is not about tasks, and keep it there for a term.
Lead behaviours
They know, and they find it hard.
Your most useful next step: Work alongside them on one relational task, such as a round of one-to-ones or a difficult conversation, and let them watch it done before doing it themselves.
Lead behaviours
The post genuinely does not allow the time.
Your most useful next step: Look at what the post actually carries before asking more of the person, and move or stop something so the relational part has somewhere to sit.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
This is the behaviour the leader is missing, and it is also the one you need in order to help them. What they find hard about it, and why, decides whether this is a routine problem, a belief problem or a capacity problem.
The point to put to them is not that kindness is pleasant but that it is load-bearing. Their team’s willingness to bring problems early, cover at short notice and stay is produced by this and by nothing else they are currently doing.
This is the most practical lever available. A leader who finds relational work uncomfortable can still redesign a meeting, and the meeting is where most of their team’s experience of being led actually happens.
How you handle this conversation is itself the lesson. A leader given relational feedback in a brisk, efficient meeting has just been shown that the message does not apply to you.
The change asks them to accept that a strength they have been rewarded for is now costing them. That is hard to hear, and it lands only where they can consider it without having to defend themselves.
Secondary behaviours
Use this before the conversation. A competent leader will reasonably dispute an impression and cannot dispute a pattern, so gather the departures, the requests to move, or what their team says when asked.
Use this where the post carries more than one person can deliver relationally. Moving work off it is a legitimate answer, and asking for warmth from someone with no time is not.
Use this where administrative load is the real constraint. Systems that take routine work off a leader are often the fastest route to one who has time for their team.
A useful first action
Gather something concrete before you say anything: the departures, the requests to move, or what their team says when asked. A leader who delivers will dispute an impression and cannot dispute a pattern.
Suggested approach
- Gather evidence rather than impressions, because a delivering leader will reasonably contest anything less.
- Establish what they think is happening, before telling them what you think is happening.
- Check whether the post allows the time, and fix that first if it does not.
- Ask for a change to one routine rather than a change of personality, and choose a routine their team will notice.
- Work alongside them on one relational task, and conduct the whole process in the way you are asking them to lead.