Is anyone ever ready for leadership?

Photo by Melike Benli.

There's a picture from the start of the summer. In it, our younger child is lying, defeated, on the blacktop at the local playground. Next to the child is a hand-me-down bike that once belonged to their big sister.

There's no caption on the photo, but if there were, we already know what it would say.

Years before the kid on the blacktop even existed, the older child was the one trying (and struggling) to get the hang of biking. And that kid looked us dead in the eyes and said, "Maybe biking's just not my thing."

And approximately 10 seconds later put feet up on pedals and decided that biking was very much their thing after all.

The big kid doesn't remember saying this but knows it from stories. Any time they don't want to do a thing cause it's hard, one of us will helpfully say "maybe biking's just not my thing." And then the big kid makes a face.

The power of yet

As parents, we are obnoxiously growth mindset. There aren't things you're not good at. There are just things you're not good at YET. It's so reflexive that our youngest once yelled, red-faced, "stop adding words to my sentences without my permission!"

We don't know if this is the product of years steeped in startup's Fake-It-Till-You-Make-It/Go-Figure-It-Out ethos. Or if it was that Janelle Monae Sesame Street video. Either way, we spend a lot of time thinking about how most hard things get easier with practice.

This is true for riding a bike. It's true for learning middle school French. And it's true for managing teams, too. Giving hard feedback, being strategic, leading with confidence, structuring a team. This is all learnable.

But something happens with leadership that doesn't happen with bicycles or French verbs. When we see someone reach for leadership and ask how to break through to the next tier, we hit them with some fixed-mindset rigidity.

You're not a natural leader.

You're not good with people.

You're not a skilled communicator.

You don't have a strong executive presence.

You're not ready for leadership.

Maybe you've been on the receiving end of these dead-end professional pronouncements. They are wholly unhelpful. There is nowhere to go once you hear it because your boss believes a negative thing about you is core to your identity. Rather than a place for development.

What's wild is that we meet bosses who can pinpoint how irritating those pronouncements were early in their own careers. And, here's the thing, it doesn't stop them from doling out the same fixed mindset nonsense to their own team. That's a shame. Because humans are miraculous. And bosses, if this is you, we need to talk.

You're not ready for leadership

Honestly, readiness for leadership is sort of a strange concept. Most leaders step into leadership before they're ready. Learning experiences are often like that. Before you learn it, you... haven't learned it. So if you're a boss saying that to someone on your team, it's worth asking yourself what's going on. It's a dead end. And you are not someone who willfully runs your team into dead-ends.

As a start, it helps to reframe it. When you tell someone they aren't ready for leadership, you usually mean, "I'm not comfortable taking that risk." And, growth mindset or not, every new leader absolutely represents risk for their organization. Unlike learning to write assembly code or play the bassoon, when someone screws up in a management role, people get hurt. That's risk. They can jeopardize projects, burn clients, negotiate bad contracts, approve bad expenses. There's a big old bucket of risk there, no doubt.

It also helps because it makes your role as a gatekeeper clear. No promotion into management is ever purely a question of matching a skills matrix to a job description. There is always an element of judgement — judgement from you, your own boss, or some executive council of wizards — to when leadership promotions happen. We're not suggesting otherwise. But at its core, in the moment when you tell someone they aren't ready for management, you're holding a gate shut.

Holding that gate shut limits your downside risk, which is part of your job. But it also undermines your person's growth. And that growth is part of your job, too.

Something to work with

One of the best, most leveraged, most impactful things you can do as a leader is to grow new, excellent leaders. If you have someone who isn't ready for leadership — who isn't ready for leadership yet — your job is to get very clear on what that means, and how we'll close that gap.

This is hard. Whether it's a first-time promotion to team lead, or finally bumping a Senior Director to VP, many bosses dissemble and dodge rather than tell their person what's going on. If you hear yourself use cheat phrases like executive presence, or support of the senior team, or visibility, or racking up a few more wins, give yourself a five-minute penalty.

Those phrases buy you time, but they don't give your person anything to work with. They're proxies for the actual gaps your person needs to hear about. What experience or skills or credibility would those wins give them that they don't already have? Why doesn't the senior team support them already?

We've found that there's really only a handful of legitimate reasons, though there are plenty of sketchier ones. Most of the time, when someone genuinely isn't ready for leadership, it means some mix of:

• You focus too much on your team/function and not enough on the org as a whole.

• Your lack of subject-matter expertise hurts your credibility with the org, and our ability to trust your judgement.

• You don't show enough self-awareness in how you're impacting other people, and feedback isn't making it through to your actions.

• Your behaviour is out of line with org values/norms, and promoting you would send the wrong signal, or reflect poorly on your own boss.

Bosses, we get it. None of these are pleasant messages to deliver. None of them are pleasant to receive, either. But anyone seeking a leadership role should be capable of hearing them. And what each of these messages have going for them is that your person can do something about them. You can do something about them, together.

The thing that requires some deeper, interior work is when you know damn well that it isn't the things on that list. When you can make up a story about credibility or self-awareness, but what's actually keeping the gate shut is your own shit. Your own bias and pattern-matching against what you think a leader looks like. Your own insecurity about what it means for this person to become a peer. What it means for your team's future, or your own future, if this person isn't part of your squad anymore because they're off building their own. You don't need us to say it but we will: that's not fair. It's not fair to them and the future they're trying to build. And it's not you at your best. It's a clutching rigidity that sets no one up for success.

Come back to basics. You have a rising leader on your team. They have ambition and energy to give more to your organization. They might not be there yet, but they are eager to get to work. Your job in this moment is to safeguard against unnecessary risk, yes, and also to support your team's growth. Management is often a hard, unloved, thankless punchline of a job, but this is an exciting amazing thing. They're not a leader today but with your help they will be. That's the whole reason to take this job in the first place.

- Melissa and Johnathan