Don’t Be the Leader You Complained About

Many years ago, when I was a young lieutenant in the US Air Force, I had a division chief who was a major. One day he was trying to hold me back from doing something that I felt really needed to be done, and when I kept pushing, he said, “you’re starting to remind me of me when I was your age.”

“Well, sir,” I replied, “you should feel honored”

After I was done doing 300 pushups (I’m kidding, we didn’t really do stuff like that) we talked about how he had complained about stuff when he was younger but was now doing exactly the sort of things he used to complain about. It just happened over time, I guess, and one day he woke up and realized he was the kind of leader he had not wanted to be when he was younger.

It’s hard enough to stay true to your ideals when you have a natural progression of increasing leadership, as we did in the military. But in many fields, you go right from being an employee to being a leader, and that’s not an evolution…that’s a jump. And when you jump into something unfamiliar, something for which you may not have been prepared, the easiest response is to go back to doing things you know. What you know, in this case, is what you saw your old bosses do. Whatever they did, there is a good chance you are going to do it, too. If they did dumb things, then guess what: so will you.

How do you avoid this in advance? Well, as you go through your career you should identify those leaders you really like and take note of what it is you like about them so you can be like them later. When you have leaders you DON’T like, pay attention to them, too, so you can learn what not to be like. Take some time every now and then to reflect on what’s important to you about your expectations for future leadership. Have someone — a close friend, a family member, a trusted colleague — who is keeping an eye on you and will tell you if you’re becoming something you said you wouldn’t become. And by the way, keep your mind open to the possibility that as you get more experience, you might just learn there is a reason things were being done the way they were being done…you didn’t know everything when you were younger, no matter what you thought at the time.

How do you address this if you are already in a leadership role? What if you look in the mirror one day and see a reflection of someone you said you never wanted to become? Well, be honest about it. You don’t have to acknowledge it to anyone else, but at least acknowledge it to yourself. Then figure out if there is anything you are doing that you don’t really have to do, but that is causing problems for your employees. Ask yourself what kind of working environment you want, and what kind you actually have, and see where the gaps are. Don’t try to change everything at once; that’s too much stress for you and it’ll freak out your employees. But don’t stretch out the problem too long, because depending on how bad you are, you may lose some people before you fix yourself.

By the way, when all was said and done, that major gave me the best career advice anyone has ever given me; more than 20 years later, I still follow it. A few years ago, when I was selected for promotion to colonel, I tracked him down and told him so. So in the end, while I didn’t turn into him, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if I had.