How Is Leadership Like Flower Arranging?

There’s a mistaken belief that once you’ve gotten really good at your job, you’ll automatically be a leader. It doesn’t make much sense. It’s not at all unusual to have a way of measuring progress for the acquisition of any new skill. There are stages of competency development for everything ranging from chess to weight lifting to flower arranging. Seriously, there actually is a title of Master Florist. And yet a commonly held assumption about leadership is that you either have it or you don’t. Nothing could be further from the truth. Leadership is a combination of behaviors and attitudes that improve as you practice over time. 

There are some serious problems with the thinking that leadership follows automatically once you’ve become a skillful practitioner in your field. 

First, people keep getting promoted into positions of increasing responsibility without consistent support for their leadership development. I’ve seen this in a number of industries. In fact, there’s even a well known principle, called the Peter Principle: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

There’s loads of research on this and the conclusion is, in short, the Peter Principle is real. One such study was cited in a Forbes article: Three professors - Alan Benson of the University of Minnesota, Danielle Li of MIT and Kelly Shue of Yale -analyzed the performance of 53,035 sales employees at 214 American companies from 2005 to 2011. During that time, 1,531 of those sales reps were promoted to become sales managers. The data showed that the best salespeople were more likely to a) be promoted and b) perform poorly as managers.

This has implications for decision-making, dealing with conflict and pretty much every other area of people management. And unfortunately, there are downstream effects from poor management and leadership. 

There’s another problem with the assumption that you become a good leader just by being good at your job. And that is the self-judgment that plagues you when you think you should just know how to do it. When you’re able to recognize that being a subject matter expert and being a leader often involve very different competencies, it’s possible to be more patient with yourself as you evolve.

For example, I had a client who was a highly experienced health care provider. But he frequently lost his temper and was impatient with his colleagues. He cared deeply about his work, and was motivated to grow. He kept a log of his progress and the times when he fell short. Initially, he was hard on himself for falling short but persisted in practicing the strategies we’d come up with. One day he told me, “This is a skill and I need to work on it. It won’t magically be done in a short time.” Just because he was a capable “doer” didn’t mean he’d automatically be able to lead.

A third problem is when people who make promotion decisions decide someone is a lost cause because they haven’t yet stepped into a leadership role. The person may not even know what’s expected of them as a leader because they’ve been focused on becoming a good practitioner. A more helpful approach might be to give the person clear guidance about what leadership behavior would look like and offer appropriate support for them to practice new skills. Luckily, my client’s boss was willing to invest in her development to see if she could grow as a leader. 

What’s the takeaway from this?  

If you’re that person who’s good at their job but not sure about the whole area of leadership, stop doubting yourself and go find ways to learn about and practice leadership. You’ll figure out soon enough if you’re cut out for it.

If you’re one of those people who makes promotion decisions, give some careful thought to your own beliefs about what leadership is, what do leaders do, and what are the best ways to support your people on a leadership path. If you’re lucky, your organization will have talent development programs you can tap into. Even if it doesn’t, you can still find ways to encourage your people to step into leadership roles informally.

And please, remember leadership is like flower arranging: you’ve got to practice it to get better at it.

What’s your take on this subject? Please leave a Comment!

P.S. If you or someone you know is interested in growing as a leader, consider applying for my online leadership program, Grow to Lead. Combining a leadership self-assessment, an in-depth goal setting process and 10 modules on core leadership skills, Grow to Lead is a perfect confidence booster for anyone wanting to make progress on their leadership journey. For more information, click here.