You're blocking

That is what one of my senior merchants said to me in a one to one.

About me.

We ran those sessions a particular way.

Not a status update and definitely not a to-do list run through. A to-do list run-through is a waste of a one to one.

Instead you come with what is blocking you and we work out how to clear it.

I had built that format. I was pleased with it.

He used it exactly as intended and told me the blocker was me.

My first reaction? Defensive.

Properly defensive.

Because in my head I was helping him.

The context was the range meeting with the channels. The one that matters, where the season gets picked apart by people who know their markets and their accounts and are definitely not shy about it.

He would be in front of them, and when it got difficult I would step in and settle it.

Quicker to a resolution, and it showed support for my team.

Well, I thought that was support.

What he told me was that he wanted the stage. He wanted the challenge, the feedback and the decisions that came with it.

It was in his job description and I was standing right in front of it.

He was right. It took me a while to admit it.

It looks like leadership from where I was standing

I was not deliberately undermining him. I genuinely thought I was being a good leader.

That is what makes this difficult.

Helping. Supporting. Protecting the outcome. Stepping in when things get difficult.

All of those behaviours can look like good leadership.

In that room, they were the problem.

Nothing in how I read that room would have told me I was in the way.

I had to be told.

What had to be true for him to actually say it

Three things had to be in place.

He had to believe the relationship would survive it. If he thought it would cost him, he would have said nothing and carried on being quietly managed.

There had to be a format for it. The one to one was not a progress report. The question was what is blocking you. That question has an honest answer and sometimes the honest answer is you.

And he had to be the kind of person who would say it out loud to his boss, which is rarer than most of us would like to think.

Take any one of those away and I would still be doing it.

It took a full season to change it

Not just the conversation.

A whole season.

We had to wait for that meeting to come round again.

When it did, I stepped back.

I did not stop being involved.

I spent more time with him beforehand than I ever had, going through the range, the likely challenges, where he would get pushed.

But in the room I said nothing.

That was harder than I expected, even after six months of knowing I needed to do it differently.

He handled it.

Not perfectly, and not the way I would have.

But he did not need another season of watching me handle the difficult bits.

He needed to handle them himself.

The real question underneath this

Not whether you are in someone's way. If you are, there is a reasonable chance they already know.

It is whether anyone in your organisation could tell you.

Not whether they would be right.

Whether the relationship, the format and the person all exist at the same time.

Most of the time at least one of them is missing.

Andrew