We Before I and I Before We

Ever had a good habit that turned up some bad consequences on occasion?

• The week nursing a torn ligament after exercising just like your doctor advised?

•  The hamstring pulled during yoga class?

•  The dependability that leads you to volunteer for every project (after the deafening silence following a request for a volunteer)?

In leadership, the good habit is sharing success:

• When something goes right, say “we” (even if you owned the biggest lift in the end).

• When something goes wrong, say “I” (even if you need to have a performance conversation behind the scenes with someone who didn’t meet your expectations).

Let’s start by looking at the upside of this habit before delving into the potential downside.

When someone is new to leadership, I often suggest an experiment to establish a baseline for how well someone handles this fundamental aspect of team leadership.

For one week, count the number of times you say “I” when describing wins and progress, and “we” when describing problems or misses.

I encourage them not to make any changes right away. Just observe.

Most don’t like the split of “I” vs. “We.”

This imbalance is rooted in our being biased humans. As we smooth out our communication, we’re pushing up against the self-serving attribution bias. Unless we are aware and mindful, most of us tend to take personal credit for good outcomes and assign bad outcomes to unforeseeable obstacles, externalities, or other people’s poor performance.

And this happens at the organizational level too (it was our brilliant strategy, not just good fortune). Expect a separate post on that topic at some point.

My “I/We” exercise grew out of some reading about how researchers had measured this bias by counting first-person pronouns as leaders described results. “I” attaches the speaker to success while its absence creates distance from failure.

Jim Collins offered a memorable way to think about this in Good to Great: the window and the mirror. His best leaders looked out the window to credit others when things went well and into the mirror to take responsibility when things went poorly. Less effective leaders did the reverse.

After a career as an individual contributor (or years with a boss who knew exactly what you did versus what your team did), this is one of the many ways that new heights of leadership can be dizzying. In this regard, the leader’s output is increasingly the product of their team’s efforts (and, if you’re producing work, it might mean you’re in the proverbial weeds). At some point, you’re managing managers who are in the details of the work and you’re looking at the results of their management success.

So, even if we had to “fake it ‘til we make it,” most of us learned to use “we” for collective success and “I” for mistakes, misjudgments, and the things that just could have gone better.

Disorienting? Absolutely.

Compounding that disorientation is the awareness that most of us have worked for that person who said all the right things while, we knew, meaning something a touch more selfish.  Once again (and darn it), self-awareness and authenticity are prerequisites for effective leadership.

When we are genuine in sharing about our own performance, though, we lay the groundwork for what Amy Edmondson calls “psychological safety” (the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, which research links to stronger team performance).

Of course, using the right tool for the right job is critical. 

• “I” Moments. One of the most reliable ways a leader builds safety is by naming their own fallibility to the team. When the person with the most power in the room says, “I got this wrong,” the perceived danger drops for team members. If we then engage in a group process of unpacking our mistakes, we train others how to diagnose their mistakes and that it is safe to do so in collaboration.

• “We” Moments. Celebrating collective success can help strengthen culture in much the same way “I” moments do. Spotlighting others' strengths, deflecting praise, and modeling that you can learn from those around you communicates self-confidence and trust.

Modeling both “I” and “We” behavior encourages team members to start doing the same for each other (even when you’re not in the room).

The vulnerability necessary to take this approach is one reason this good habit can have some unpleasant side effects. 

The Downside

If you perform your pronoun regimen faithfully (and you should), your own successes can blur or fade into the background. You’ve commemorated wins by sewing team member name tapes across the annual plan. Pro that you are, your name shows up nowhere.

Then your annual review rolls around. You find it hard to describe exactly what you accomplished.

And your team might not be able to either. “We love you because you show such humanity in being wrong so often” doesn’t feel like a success story.

The most important aspects of the job (like setting direction and building culture) aren’t spotlight moments with quantifiable deliverables.

Forward movement is most often incremental and hard to recognize or describe as bold success. All those small wins do add up, but they’ve also presented you with the next problem that you’re in the midst of managing.

And then there are all the bad things that didn’t happen because of your stellar leadership: the cashflow crisis that never materialized, the conflict you defused before the board meeting, the great hire that worked out because of three careful conversations nobody witnessed.

But rest assured, anything the organization produced is ultimately your success. You hired the smart people who have agreed to be led by you and somehow guided them toward achievements (even if it felt like dumb luck on occasion). If the team's wins don't count as evidence of your leadership, what does?

You can certainly draft a killer annual accomplishments memo for your board. That’s not really the issue. The issue is how you come to feel good about your performance in a role that is notoriously hard to evaluate.

How do you consistently publicly unpack your own mistakes and share credit and not fall prey to imposter syndrome? Or worse, feeling put out and resenting everyone in the system for not acknowledging your accomplishments properly (the first ingredient in a burnout soufflé)?

Your public pronoun discipline requires an offsetting discipline behind the scenes to keep you balanced.

You need a coach, a peer group, or a trusty journal to express “I did that” or “I set that up to happen.” That discipline forces you to define what you think successful contributions are in your role (whether there is public credit for those or not). And you need someone who has managed or is managing this ambiguity and understands the tightrope you walk.

Speaking of Reflection

After the “I/We” exercise, I often need to offer up a counterbalancing practice to help leaders see their accomplishments in the space between “I” and “We.” 

I recommend a few questions to guide this process:

• What are three things that succeeded this week because of conditions you created? What was your contribution? 

• What are three things you did well this week (big or small)? 

• With whom is it safe to claim your success? Who understands you and this role? 

• Who is doing something now that they couldn't (or wouldn't) do a year ago? What was your part in that? 

• What's something you're proud of that you've never said out loud to anyone?

Try the pronoun exercise this week. Then try the reflection questions above (the harder exercise for most of my clients).

Naming your contributions, relishing them privately, and sharing them in close circles is the regimen that prevents burnout and resentment.

Most leaders don’t get much positive feedback because others are looking to them for just that. And what feedback they get may not be about things they value.

Remember that between the “I” and the “We” is “You.” Make sure you pay attention to all three.

If this landed, I'd love to hear how the counting goes; reply or find me on LinkedIn and tell me what you noticed. And if you're a leader who's gotten very good at the window but hasn't looked in the mirror lately (for wins, not just misses), that's exactly the kind of conversation coaching is for. My door's open.

Email me at gary@garybagley.com or DM me on LinkedIn.