They Call It Leadership, Not Tellership. So Why Are Leaders Still Telling People What To Do?

New ideas often come from unexpected places. We don’t know when they are going to arrive, as they are pretty good at keeping their itineraries hidden from us. But more often than not, I find they typically come through a perfect mashup of a great conversation, some creative thinking, and a healthy dose of humour to keep things fun.

Recently, a coaching client was recounting their past week. It was yet another week in which their manager was dictating instructions and actions that my client needed to take, as if the manager was reading verbatim from a 1972 business manual. As my client spoke about some challenging business decisions and pinch points in front of him, this manager started each soliloquy with “What you really need to do is…”

My client was pissed off. I was pissed off. We rapidly agreed that this was bullshit of the highest degree!             

I remarked, “Why is your manager doing this? I mean, they call it leadership, not tellership, for a reason...right?”

My client threw his arms up and almost jumped out of his chair.

“EXACTLY!” he exclaimed.

Enough said.

After our coaching session, I carried around the idea of Tellership for a few weeks. It took me a while to fully embrace this idea. I also had to work through my own rap sheet of guilt and past crimes - times when, as a leader, I also practiced Tellership. I had no shortage of examples where I had the opportunity to build my team’s capacity to solve their own challenges and problems, but instead I chose to tell them what to do. Instead of teaching people how to fish, I was handing out tuna and salmon like a fishmonger at a public market.

I let my teams down. I let myself down. Many, many times.

Lots of our behaviours and actions come from muscle memory. Leadership is no different. When faced with a tough situation, we often react instantaneously through a series of unconscious moves. We’ve been here before, we’ve had these feelings in the past, and our experiences tell us that we know what to do. Something is about to punch us in the face, so we better knock it in the chicklets first. In other words, I need to tell my employees what to do. That will fix everything.

But the reality is that it never works. It’s never the right move as a leader.

Tellership is literally the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream for leaders. In a moment of weakness, when you are overwhelmed, stressed out, and under pressure from all sides, you reach for it. You think it’s going to make things better. As soon as you put the first spoonful in your mouth, you regret it. But you can’t stop yourself. You keep going. And going. And going. Next thing you know, you’ve finished the entire container. 

In the context of the leadership experience, that means you’ve just spent 30 minutes with your employee and dictated a barrage of instructions and advice with the full belief that you are doing the right thing. Or sometimes you choose to go next-level and really screw things up by just taking the work away from the person and doing it yourself.

A great leader is skilled at asking the right questions.

Today we know that a great leader isn’t the person who’s skilled at telling their team what to do. A great leader is skilled at asking the right questions. In a completely safe and empathetic environment, a great leader helps their people to find the solutions that they will own, take forward, and grow from. These solutions are fueled with the momentum that comes from this self-discovery. This is what great leadership looks like, in a landscape where the coaching stance inspires and guides us.

More and more, the consensus grows in support of this stance. A recent Harvard Business Review article said, “rapid, constant, and disruptive change is now the norm, and what succeeded in the past is no longer a guide to what will succeed in the future. Twenty-first-century managers simply don’t (and can’t!) have all the right answers.” 

Fact.

To be clear, this view isn’t just gut instinct or management voodoo. Neuroscience has no shortage of data to show us that when we are told what to do, the information lurks around our hippocampus (where we store memories and learning) but doesn’t lock itself in. The advice or instruction has a cup of coffee with our brain, and then it just moves on. But when we experience a learning ourselves through our own thinking and introspection, it hard codes itself into our hippocampus and becomes a valuable asset that we can use over and over again.

So what’s holding us back from getting to a future where Tellership is over? 

Well, to get a view into what this future looks like, there’s probably nobody better to ask than a futurist! Bob Johansen from the Futures Institute in California is the epitome of a thought leader in my books. During my career at Electronic Arts, I was fortunate to be in his presence during a leadership workshop. In his book The New Leadership Literacies, Johansen lays out a compelling view of what the landscape looks like for leaders in the future. What’s clear is that there’s no room for Tellership in it.

Johansen sees that in the distributed and decentralized future world of business, leaders will need to feel present when they aren’t present. They will have to be able to communicate leadership vision and run effective teams even when they are not there. In short, you won’t be able to tell people what to do, because the context and structure in which you are working won’t allow you to do it. The classic stance of Tellership will become a void proposition.

(There are a ton of great leadership books out, but I implore you to pick up Johansen’s book for what I think are the most holistic and thought-provoking views on leadership that will prepare us for the world in front of us).

All of my thoughts on this are anchored in a declaration I offer; the coaching stance is the leadership superpower for the future. It is the antidote for everyone trying to escape from the Tellership Era. When we act as leaders who coach, we don’t even have the chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream in the freezer.

So let’s agree that the Tellership Era is over. It’s dead to us. We thought it was our friend, but in the future we know it is our unbeatable foe. To be better leaders, we will embrace the coaching stance and resist the temptation and muscle memory to tell; instead we will have the courage to ask questions and empower our people and teams to solve the problems and resolve the challenges that they are fully capable of doing.

When we all choose to do this, then we will be living in the Leadership Era.

#RIPTELLERSHIP