Showing your human side

I've been interested to hear employees giving their views about leadership blogs on my travels recently, and taking two very different perspectives.

In one company, people loved a leader's new blog. There were lots of comments about how it was 'nice to see leaders are human', and it had prompted a lot of discussion in people's teams. In fact, the leaders who I heard most often quoted as examples of great communicators were referenced because they made things human, referred to their families and told personal stories.

In another, people were bemused by it and seemed to think the leader must have gone a bit potty to be telling them about all this personal stuff - they wondered why s/he thought they would want to know, and took it as a signal that this person must be out of touch.

It's a difficult balance for leaders to strike, don't you think? In my leadership comms workshops, we often talk about about the need to be a normal, fallible human being, not some kind of over-polished spin machine who faithfully trots out the company line, but doesn't connect with people or engender trust. In fact I remember reading (although I really wish I could remember where!) about a theory on leadership that talks about revealing 'allowable weaknesses'. Presumably enough to show your human side but not so much that people get a bit jittery about this person running the business that apparently has no idea what they're doing...

Some leaders don't like the idea of showing themselves, either. They see the 'personal' side of themselves as ... well ... personal.  Work colleagues get their professional persona. Friends and family get to see the other side.

It's interesting thinking about all this from my own perspective, as a person with a blog.  Some people who read this are personal friends. Some people I've met on workshops. Some people I've never met at all. Yet over the past 2 years, I've told you quite a lot about myself. You know the things that are important to me, and that I have a permanent battle with work/life balance. You know I have my under-confident moments. I've talked about some of the things that drive me mad, make me laugh or upset me and things that have made me think.

Actually I'm quite a private person, so it can feel strange and a tad uncomfortable to talk about those things to people I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if you think 'what IS she going on about?!', or don't know why I think you might be remotely interested in a subject or my opinion on it. On occasion I've held back from posting things with those thoughts in mind. And on the fallibility point, a couple of years ago I was featured in a coaching book as someone who had overcome a massive fear of presentations. They wanted to use my case study on their publicity website, too. My response? "No way! I run workshops for a living! I can't have clients knowing I used to be petrified of them!" (Now I've told you about that, too. Doh! I promise I don't shake in my shoes when I run them these days!)

What's your perspective on this? Do leaders in your organisations show their human sides, and to what extent? Does it work for them, or has it backfired? And how do we help them to strike the right balance and figure out whether the risks of revealing their real selves - including their failings - are worth the payoffs?

Sue

 

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