Perhaps you have experienced this.
A leader who is extremely task-focused is told that their relationships are becoming frayed.
So, instead of working on the relationships, they make them a task.
Their answer is to take everyone individually to lunch to show them they care. Once the lunches are over, they resume their singular focus on getting things done.
Many leaders are exceedingly task-focused. It’s a quality that makes them effective and tees them up for promotion. They get a lot done.
People, especially those above them, value how productive they are. Everyone knows they will do whatever it takes to get the work completed.
Their focus on tasks and achieving short-term goals produces a reputation that they enjoy. So, they become ever more laser-focused on task accomplishment.
Unfortunately, the more task-focused they become, the more likely it is for them to undermine their relationships with the people who help them execute.
Their drive, urgency, and relentless pursuit of outcomes typically make them insensitive to the needs and concerns of others.
They push, prod, and cajole others to the benefit of outcomes but to the detriment of the trust, caring, and respect critical to relationships.
Leaders who are too task-focused normally make everything a task. Whatever feedback they receive, it becomes a problem to resolve through commitment and action.
Regrettably, they apply this logic to relationships as well.
Once they learn that team members and colleagues find them difficult and relationally off-putting, they set their sights on fixing it by making relationship quality just another task.
They naturally play to their strengths. It’s how they see the world.
The problem is that relationships that get treated as outcomes to achieve and tasks to complete never fully form or develop.
People don’t feel respected, important, or cared for when a leader sees them as a problem to solve. The lunch (and anything like it) is seen as a ploy, not as an investment in time and understanding.
Task-focused leaders who want to become better relationally must expand their idea of what it means to be effective. A task-only focus is singular. It puts a moat around achievement alone.
The value a leader places on people adds a new dimension to how they achieve tasks. When the relationships they depend upon become as important as the tasks, effectiveness becomes multi-dimensional.
Task-focused leaders who fail to make this move will always have rocky and damaged relationships.
It’s usually not because they don’t care about people. But their extreme task focus creates a huge gap between how they feel about people and how they make people feel.
Every leader needs to narrow that gap.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
