I’ve got a question for anyone who has people reporting to them, and I want you to be really honest with yourself when you answer it.
If you handed in your notice tomorrow and moved to another company, how many people on your current team would want to come and work for you again?
I mean actual names. Not “I think most of my team would” or “we’ve got a great relationship”, but who specifically would want you as their boss again if they had a choice?
And how do you actually know? Have they given you a real reason to believe that, or are you assuming it because they seem happy working for you?
I’d also push you to think about why they’d follow you. Someone choosing to work for you again doesn’t automatically make you a good leader. I’ve seen plenty of people follow a manager because it’s comfortable, they know what to expect, they never get challenged, or simply because it makes their working life easier.
Put those two answers together, who would follow you and why, and I think they tell you quite a lot about the kind of leader you’ve been.
Having a leadership title and actually being someone people want to follow are two very different things. Your title gives you authority over people; they have to attend your meetings, deliver the work you’ve asked for and listen to your decisions. That’s part of having a job and reporting to someone. It doesn’t mean they trust you, respect you or have any loyalty towards you.
From what I’ve seen, a lot of leaders confuse the two.
I’ve always believed that leadership is a service. If you’re going to take responsibility for a team of people, then you have a responsibility to those people as well as the business paying you. You should want them to succeed, to develop, to become better at what they do and to have opportunities they might not have had without you.
That doesn’t mean being everyone’s best friend or making work easy for them - quite the opposite. Sometimes it means pushing someone well outside their comfort zone, telling them something they don’t want to hear or having a conversation you’d both rather avoid.
There's also a difference between believing you're pushing someone because you want them to succeed and making sure they actually know that's why you're doing it. Your intentions don't count for much if the person on the receiving end experiences something completely different
When you've consistently shown people that you've got their back, they remember it. Whether that's fighting for their promotion behind closed doors, giving them credit for their work or putting them forward for an opportunity even when it means losing them from your team.
They also know when you’re not doing any of those things.
I don’t think trust and loyalty are things you can ask people for either. You earn them over time, usually through the small things you do consistently rather than some grand gesture, and they’re incredibly easy to lose.
I’ll put my hand up here: I’ve made plenty of mistakes as a leader myself. I’ve pushed people too hard, got things wrong and had to learn that what I thought was helping someone wasn’t always what they needed from me. But, I also learned that people will give you an enormous amount when they know you really care about them and want them to do well.
When I say give, I don’t mean working every hour of the day or sacrificing their own lives for your business. I mean they’ll be honest with you, they’ll challenge you, they’ll care about the work they’re doing and they’ll want to be part of what you’re building.
That’s how you build a high-performing team that people actually want to stay in.
I know none of this is new. We’ve been talking about trust, loyalty and good leadership for decades. But I do wonder how many people with leadership titles actually stop and think about whether anyone would voluntarily choose to be led by them.
Especially now, when there’s so much uncertainty about what work is going to look like over the next few years. If you’re expecting people to trust you through all of that, you’d better have given them a reason to trust you before things started changing.
There’s another side to this too. Someone can be incredibly loyal to you and still decide to leave your team. In fact, if you’ve done your job well, they might outgrow the opportunities you can give them. I’d consider that a success, not a failure. I'd much rather have someone leave my team because I've helped them grow than stay because I've made them dependent on me.
The point isn’t to build a group of people who will follow you blindly wherever you go. It’s to become the kind of leader people would happily choose to work with again because they know you made a difference to their career and how they experienced work.
So go back to that first question.
How many names can you actually write down?
If you’re struggling to think of anyone, or the reasons they’d follow you aren’t the ones you’d want, I’d be asking myself whether I’ve actually earned the trust of the people I lead, or whether I’ve just been relying on the authority that comes with my job title.
P.S. Trust is at the center of the one or two day leadership workshop I run for teams going through change. If your people are facing a lot of uncertainty right now and you want them to trust you through it, send me a message with “workshop” and I’ll tell you how it works.