The Far Reaching Impact of Leadership Behaviors

Executive Leaders must understand and embrace how the ‘Ripple Effect’ is influencing others in both positive and negative ways.

I walked into the TeleCable Targeting office without an appointment and asked for the person in charge. I was a young, eager, and naive 20-year-old college student who’d found the company in the yellow pages while searching for places where I thought I seek get an internship.

I met the guy in charge, Jeff. After only a few minutes of conversation, I was confused. He told me that they didn’t offer internships because they would only be a distraction and burden to his office. But he also didn’t push me out the door right away. While attempting to convince him otherwise, he applauded my efforts while continuing to challenge me.

Back and forth, the dance continued… Challenge, support, and encourage. I wasn’t getting the black-and-white answer I expected, but I wasn’t asked to leave immediately either. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Jeff was ‘leading by example.’

I ended up working with him for the next several years. This early experience (and many others) were excellent leadership examples that helped me become a valuable contributor. More powerfully, when it came time for me to lead, I witnessed how to do it successfully. More than twenty-five years later, the experiences I witnessed from Jeff have now positively impacted thousands of people. This is the beauty of The Ripple Effect.

Everything we do as a leader spreads out in many directions over time and space, well beyond our intentions or conscious awareness. This is especially true for executives whose influence often carries more power and significance.

My leadership development work with executives explores the individual behaviors of the executives I coach. I often discover a direct correlation between the behaviors they exhibit and the types of leadership they’ve experienced from others in their past.

Over the last several years, I’ve had the good fortune to be directly involved in the coaching and developing several hundred executive leaders. It’s eye-opening to see and hear how leadership behaviors negatively influence so many people.

I’m one of the lucky ones. I had access to great leaders and witnessed dozens of excellent leadership traits I could emulate when it was my turn to lead naturally. However, even with many positive examples, I also picked up some less effective and more challenging leadership behaviors too. Until I learned otherwise, I unconsciously passed them along to others around me.

I see this repeatedly in my executive coaching work with executives. These leaders must work to understand better how their leadership is affecting others, understanding which aspects of their actions and behaviors are helpful and which are not.

This is not about fixing bad leaders. Quite the opposite. It’s those great leaders who do most tasks very well that end up having issues that continue to be ignored. Since the majority of their contributions are positive, some of their blindspots are overlooked as a priority. But these poor behaviors are creating ripples as well - Not good ones. Great leaders must be aware and work to address any gaps in all the key areas of their leadership.

I remember a senior leader who had years of great success as an executive within multiple organizations.

The majority of her behaviors were effective and worth duplicating. However, she had a blindspot around genuinely connecting with others. This was detrimental to herself, her leadership team and the organization. The lack of trust and empathy led others to hold back and the quality of new ideas was stifled. This leader’s executive team was limited based on one element of her leadership and communication style.

Even more concerning, as these leaders continued to spend more time together, the detrimental behaviors began to ripple across individual departments as next-level leaders subconsciously emulated these traits.

But, there is a happy ending. This leader accepted the importance of these behaviors and worked hard to make necessary improvements. Her immediate team and many well beyond your inner circle continue to benefit from her positive changes.

What about you? How do you see The Ripple Effect impacting your leadership and the leadership of others around you? It’s too risky to ignore these important topics because once the ripple begins, you can’t stop it. But you can create positive ripples in the future.

Have you gotten a fresh look at your blind spots? What ripples are you spreading across those you work with daily? Want to find out? Let’s connect.