There are mirrors in our house that I trust more than others.
The bedroom mirror is reasonably supportive. The bathroom mirror is unnecessarily detailed, particularly first thing in the morning. Hotel bathroom mirrors appear to have been designed by people who previously conducted police interrogations.
As I have grown older, they have also become rather crowded.
Sometimes I look in the mirror and see my dad looking back at me. If the lighting is good, I see my mum when she was my age.
It is one of the less discussed consequences of ageing. Eventually, genetics stops being background information and joins you in the bathroom.
I recently looked into a hotel mirror and suggested that the lighting made me look older.
Stella said the lighting was doing its best.
Amber suggested the mirror for the fifth piece in this series because, before leaders diagnose everybody else, they may need to examine themselves.
Stella said we had finally reached the central theme.
I am beginning to suspect Amber and Stella are collaborating.
Unfortunately, the leadership mirror is more complicated than the one above the bathroom sink.
A physical mirror shows us the face we are presenting.
It does not show us what it feels like to be led by it.
I have lost count of the conversations that begin with a leader explaining what their team needs.
They need more confidence.
They need to communicate better.
They need to take accountability and show greater initiative.
Sometimes, they do.
Then you watch the leader in action.
They ask a question and answer it themselves. They interrupt explanations, correct ideas before they are fully formed and involve themselves in every decision. When somebody raises a concern, they explain why it is not really a concern. When somebody makes a mistake, they arrive with the enthusiasm of a detective who has already identified the murderer.
Eventually, the team stops taking initiative.
The leader points to this as further evidence that the team lacks initiative.
A development programme is commissioned.
For the team.
It is always easier to send 20 people on a course than ask one senior person to look in the mirror.
Teams contain humans, which means they come with talent, fear, ambition, insecurity, good intentions and the occasional person who can turn a simple email into a constitutional crisis.
But leaders help create the conditions in which all of that appears.
You cannot repeatedly take the steering wheel and then complain that nobody else is driving.
Many leaders I work with believe they are self aware. They say things such as:
“I know I can be direct.”
“I know I am impatient.”
“People know what I’m like.”
This is often presented as evidence of emotional maturity.
It is not.
Knowing that you do something, then expecting everybody else to absorb the consequences, is not self awareness. It is advance warning.
It is the leadership equivalent of a product label saying, “May cause anxiety, confusion and unnecessary meetings.”
Self awareness requires curiosity about impact.
Do people become clearer when I speak, or simply quieter?
Do they bring me problems early, or wait until those problems have developed their own postcode?
We judge ourselves by our intentions. We know we were trying to help, protect standards or prevent a mistake.
Everyone else experiences what we actually did.
Our intention may explain our behaviour. It does not cancel its effect.
That is why the best leadership mirrors are other people: colleagues, team members, customers and occasionally a wife wearing a fleece while you explain that 21 degrees is objectively warm.
Of course, asking for feedback only helps if people can answer honestly.
There is little value in saying, “Tell me what you really think,” while wearing the facial expression of someone preparing to cross examine a hostile witness.
What they sometimes want is reassurance delivered in the style of candour.
AI may help surface patterns in communication, workload and decision making. It might reveal where work repeatedly stalls, whose meetings consume the most time or why bad news becomes more optimistic on its journey upstairs.
It may even suggest that the leader is the recurring variable.
That is a clue to investigate, not a verdict to outsource.
Naturally, if the data identifies me, I shall demand a much deeper review of the methodology.
AI can reveal patterns. It cannot make us emotionally mature enough to examine them honestly.
Before replacing the team, changing the structure or commissioning another initiative, it may be worth asking:
What am I doing that helps create the behaviour I am complaining about?
Next week, we move from the mirror to the window and ask why leaders so often mistake their view for the whole landscape.
I tried the mirror exercise while finishing this blog.
Stella walked past and asked what I was doing.
I explained that I was reflecting on how my behaviour affects the people around me.
She suggested I start by listening when she says she is cold.
I pointed out that the mirror was intended for reflection, not reopening historical complaints.
She said I had been looking at myself for less than a minute and was already arguing with the mirror.
Apparently, the mirror works.
The difficulty is getting the person in it to listen.
