Building a team - dealing with intimidation

I’m working with Elizabeth, a senior executive in Finance. She is responsible for completely reshaping the accounting organization – outsourcing, segmenting roles, restructuring, raising the skill level and expertise…

She is incredibly smart, funny, and professional. She also sees herself in a bigger role someday. She was surprised when she found out that people were intimidated and afraid of her. Even her direct reports were not willing to ask her questions or tell her what they were thinking.

Elizabeth took this personally. She worried about how to engage better, how to be less intimidating, what could be causing this. She swung between “I don’t care, I just need to get this done” to “what can I do to relate better with my employees”. She thought about situations where she might have said something differently, and other situations where she did something that seemed to engage people positively. 

This thinking was taking up a whole lot of energy that would be spent better on other things. And I realized that I hadn’t ever had this conversation with the men executives I had worked with.

• Women executives are more likely to deal with issues with intimidation because of the degree of power and authority they have. 
• Women have a need for a team to really collaborate with – people want to work with people we like and people we trust. 
• Women are more sensitive to how they are being perceived. And it is harder for us to separate the personal relationship from the professional relationship. It hurts our feelings when people don't like us or say mean things about us (and it really ticks us off).

So we spend a lot of time trying to be less intimidating, pulling our team together, and worrying about what people are saying and whether they like us or not. It is frankly quite exhausting.

• Get out there and talk to your “team”. Instead of staying in your head, take action. It’s your job as a leader to get your direct reports playing well together.
• Tell them what you want to achieve, share your stories. Find out who they are, what they really enjoy doing, what brings them to work each day.
• Talk about why you need them on the team. What do they do that you like?
• And most importantly, tell them what you like and don’t like. We tend to focus on the job and tasks at hand. Elizabeth needed to tell people her criteria: that she hated to be surprised about problems and concerns (hearing them in the hall drove her crazy) – she wanted people to tell her directly. She also liked well thought out options and ideas when people were presenting problems (people coming in to vent and complain irritated her). This helped people know what to do to build their credibility and relationship with her.
• Finally, if you have someone on your team who doesn't fit, make a change. I've seen women keep a person because of a skill/experience level but who was disrespectful and sabotaging their efforts. Is this making life better? easier?  

When we run into these challenges – rumors, intimidation, relationship-related issues – I’ve seen a tendency, especially with women, to hope it will all work out. To think if we keep plowing ahead, ignoring the problem, and making progress, the problems will somehow sort themselves out. But we can make our lives and our work so much more enjoyable by dealing with these challenges. Telling people what you expect helps. Getting to know them and sharing your own stories helps. 

Building relationships and trust takes time and it may mean we need to be uncomfortable for a while.