Quiet Cracking:
Why the Solution Is Killing You

The leadership industry sells inadequacy. And you keep buying.

The premise of every leadership training I've ever seen is the same: let's look more closely at what you're not doing right.

What an awful sentence. And yet it's the foundation of an entire industry.

The result is a generation of leaders staring at themselves, judging themselves against standards and rules, trying to fit an image — a description, a prescription — of what leadership should look like. Which means they're spending their energy on themselves, working on themselves, coming from the place of I'm not good enough and I have to become my best self.

This is nonsense. And it only makes things worse, because it is the problem.

Continual self-focus. Continual comparison against ideals. Always just being human and feeling crappy about it. So please — buy another leadership book. Judge yourself against another framework. We've created a never-ending leadership inadequacy machine fed by a never-ending series of how-to-be-a-leader books. Three ways. Five ways. Ten ways. The one way. The only way.

Just what you need: more mental energy attacking what's wrong with you. That's what leads to being overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious. That's what leads to quiet cracking.

All leadership systems start from the same place: you don't measure up, and here's how. I think this is completely stupid, and I've read most of the books. I've taught the subject from the books. How to make people feel crappy and make money at it — what a business model.

The Gigantic Fly in the Ointment

The whole approach is backwards.

Let's say I'm the boss of a team and I do nothing — and the team knocks it out of the park. That's pretty damn good leadership. Didn't spend any energy. Got the best result.

Or I could be irritating the hell out of the team with a bunch of how-to-get-along training, which is really just guilt work from leadership dressed up as development.

Staring at the leader and trying to make them better is an exercise in imaginary role-playing dress-up. It's just not real. There's only a single measure of leadership that matters:

Are the people being led successful?

Period. Were they set up to succeed? Are they being helped to stay successful? That's it.

Looking in the Wrong Place

Leadership is about helping others succeed. If all the measurements and all the standards have you looking at yourself — worried about how you look — then the standards have you looking in the wrong place and working on the wrong thing.

Your team needs you to move a rock out of their way? Go move the rock. Get back to your leadership studies afterwards.

It's not about you. And the least amount of leadership that gets the best results is ideal.

I'm almost ready to hide the leader entirely. Let them be there, doing their job — but I want to see how the team does. If the team isn't doing well, I don't care what the leader is doing. If the leader is doing all kinds of great leadership stuff and the team's not doing great, I still don't care what the leader is doing.

When a leader wakes up in the morning, they shouldn't care what they're doing or what it looks like. They should care about one thing: what can I get out of the way of my team today?

Throw Out the Lists

The qualities. The activities. The exercises. The thinking frameworks. They're helpful only if you're using them to help somebody get a rock out of the way so the team can move. If the team doesn't need you to work on it in order to move forward, you're wasting your time for imaginary reasons.

What does the team need out of its way? Go figure that out. Help get it out of the way. That is leadership.

Everything else is playing with yourself. It doesn't work. It stresses you out. It leads to quiet cracking.

And if you're actually helping people get things out of their way — they're not cracking either.

This seems obvious now. It didn't for most of my career. It does now, so I keep writing about it. Because I finally figured out what made me a really good boss when I was one — even though I didn't know it at the time. I was getting things out of the way of my team. And they were getting a lot done.