I read an article by Dan Shapero – an executive at Linkedin – many years ago that I’ve thought about often since.
Dan’s article begins by sharing some context from when he became a manager.
“Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to the other slide.”
That’s an awfully lame joke (it was printed on my 3 year old son’s popsicle stick), and yet, if you are a manager and tell that joke to your team, people might laugh… they need to laugh because they need you to like them.
When I took my first management job, I fell into this trap. To be honest, although I’ve had my funny moments, I’m no standup comic. Yet, as soon as I got promoted, I got more laughs. So I started telling more jokes… any joke in fact. I thought I was getting funnier, but in fact I was getting less funny… and bordering on annoying. I’d lost my feedback signal. I had become less self-aware.
The article goes on to make a salient point – Your social compass needs to come increasingly from inside of you,
I’ll push on this further and say there are two truths –
(1) As you become more senior in an organization, feedback becomes more subtle. Your self-awareness needs to be attuned to subtle feedback.
There’s a trade-off here if you don’t calibrate your feedback. Over time, you’ll get plenty of feedback – direct and indirect from various sources. So it is important to not overreact but just as important to not be oblivious.
(2) The most important feedback you can learn to read is feedback that reflects a lack of confidence in your leadership. Ignore that for a while and you’ll just find yourself surprised one day when you’re told you’re fired.
