“I did exactly what you taught us. IT DID NOT WORK!”, said Carlos in utter frustration while throwing his hands up in exasperation.
Let me paint you the picture of what happened.
Carlos, a supervisor at a utility facility and a proud high-D personality (for those familiar with DISC), had just returned from a meeting across the building. As he walked past one of his team members, he noticed something that made his blood pressure spike – the employee was sitting at his desk, completely absorbed in crushing candy on his phone. Now, this particular individual wasn’t exactly in the running for Employee of the Month, if you catch my drift.
Carlos’s response? He called out casually, “Hey, whenever you get a chance, can you enter this information into the report for me?” Then he kept walking.
Before I tell you what happened next, I want you to pause for a moment. Put yourself in this scenario. What do you think unfolded? Go deeper than your initial reaction. What dynamics were really at play here? What was driving ‘s behavior?
If you guessed that the information never made it into that report, you’d be absolutely right.
During our coaching session, Carlos was still steaming. He defended his approach, insisted he’d followed my guidance, and couldn’t understand why it had failed so spectacularly. But here’s the kicker – when I pressed him, Carlos admitted something telling: “I knew he wasn’t going to do it.”
Think about that for a second. Carlos was frustrated with his employee for not completing the task, upset about the situation spiraling out of control, and desperately wanted it all to just disappear. Yet deep down, he already knew the outcome before he’d even walked away.
That’s when I had to deliver some hard truth: “Carlos, the issue isn’t with the system we discussed. The problem is your execution. Let me be direct with you – in this situation, you became the problem.”
Here’s what actually happened: Carlos gave a vague, open-ended request (“whenever you get a chance”) to someone he observed actively avoiding work, then expected results within twenty minutes. On top of that, he completely ignored the elephant in the room – the fact that his employee was playing games during work hours.
This is where servant leadership gets real, folks. Servant leaders take responsibility and ownership for holding people accountable, even when it means having those uncomfortable, difficult conversations that we’d all rather avoid. They refuse to stay trapped in the comfortable lie of self-deception. Servant leaders serve to address real challenges and help team members be better.
But there’s something deeper at work here – something that the Arbinger Institute calls self-deception. Carlos had convinced himself that his passive approach was “the right way” while simultaneously knowing it wouldn’t work. He was deceiving himself about his own role in the problem.
The Arbinger Institute puts it this way: “Self-deception blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the ‘solutions’ we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception obscures the truth about ourselves, corrupts our view of others and our circumstances, and inhibits our ability to make wise and helpful decisions.” Carlos was trapped in his own box of self-deception – blaming his employee’s poor performance while avoiding the uncomfortable reality that he wasn’t leading effectively. He wanted to be seen as the “nice guy” while secretly hoping someone else would magically solve the problem.
But here’s the beautiful part of this story. Several weeks later, my inbox lit up with an email from Carlos. The subject line read “Success Story!” Carlos had learned that instead of tossing out vague requests and hoping for magical results, he needed to step up with clarity and directly address problematic behavior. Were those conversations comfortable? Absolutely not. Was he making progress? You bet.
