A633.4.4.RB - Should the 'Boss' Always Know the Answers?

I’ve certainly had situations in my life where I’ve had to lead, even though I wasn’t officially the “leader,” but I wanted to focus in this post on an example that is as far from the boundaries of traditional professional leadership as it gets: an example from my marriage.

My relationship with my wife is full a partnership, but like any marriage, our roles continually shift depending on what’s going on in our lives. If we’re thinking through a vacation plan, for instance, she almost always takes the lead. She’s passionate about travel and loves making plans, researching hidden gems, perusing hotels. Me? I mostly just like the travel part. Getting away. We have the same goals when we travel, but in the months leading up to the vacation itself, our skills and interests vary, and so we take advantage of that. By vacation time, we’re both psyched and ready to go.

In other areas, though, roles reverse. At the start of the year, for example, I wanted us to set a goal to pay off all of our debt. This wasn’t an easy sell, though, since it would mean a full year of intense, focused hard work and sacrifice. Long story short: I eventually got her onboard — essentially using the same framework clarified in Harvard Management (How to, 2009), although I didn’t know it at the time — and we started our journey.

The first thing we did was establish our goal — which we wrote down on a white board, making it “real” — but what I realized early on was that the goal wasn’t entirely monetary. The goal had more to do with our why than our what. Why did we want to be debt-free? Why was it important? By identifying, and clearly communicating, the deeper reasons behind our goal — to reduce monthly budget stress, travel more, retire early — I appealed to more sustaining motivations, and that’s what ultimately “sold” us both on the mission.

Playing the role of leader in what became a collective goal, I knew that I would need to “think systematically” (How to, 2009), in drawing out a plan that not only laid out the steps we would need to take (budget/timeline), but was also supported by data that what we were doing was possible, and worth it. I found this in podcasts like “The Dave Ramsey Show,” which has worked as a steady diet of inspiration along the way, as well as motivating personal finance stories I’d find and forward her way.

The next two steps were to continually engage my wife and to learn. In adaptive companies, people expect to constantly tweak the strategic plan as new information is learned — they don’t treat it like a “sacred text” (Heifetz, 2009). And the same is true with a monthly spending budget. I realized early on that complacency was the enemy in such a long-term goal. We had to stay focused — but too much focus could lead to burnout. It was evident after a month or two that we had to incorporate a little more fun into our routine in order to maintain stamina, so I insisted that we start meeting at the beginning of every month to set our budget and decide early on how to spend part of our Entertainment Budget: what restaurants we’d visit or weekend trips we’d plan. This required her feedback, which changed everything. Not only did including her every step of way ensure that “our” goal didn’t turn into just “my” goal that I was dragging her through, but our teamwork sped up our payoff pace. I learned what was important to her, and we began paying down more and more debt per month the more involved she became with the process.

All of this served as a reminder of the lesson that “behavior breeds behavior” (Obolensky, p. 38). At first, this goal seemed terrible. It seemed like a full year of no fun and no life — for a greater good, sure, but no less difficult. Soon, however, the routine became habit. We acclimated, and this Spartan lifestyle we committed to became normal (still difficult and sometimes a little terrible, but normal). We found that we began needing less, and wanting less — and now we’re just four months away from hitting our goal!

This debt-free mission was mine to begin with, but I learned through leading it from far-away goal to right-around-the-corner accomplishment that we were only even able to come this far because of teamwork. “Diplomacy trumps aggression” (Obolensky, p. 43), and by learning to appeal to my wife as a partner, rather than forcing this idea down her throat, we learn to work together adaptively. We kept the rules simple, and we bent when flexibility was needed, but we never lost sight of our aim, and more importantly, our why. This made all the difference.

References

Heifetz, R., Linsky, M., & Grashow, A. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics or changing your organization and the world. (1^st edition.). Harvard Business Review Press.

How to Lead When You’re Not the Boss. (2009). Harvard Management Update, 14(3), 1–2. Retrieved from https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=36826490&site=ehost-live

Obolensky, N. (2014).Complex adaptive leadership. (2^nd edition.). London, UK: Gower/Ashgate.