The best news is when the problem, is you!

Leaders routinely turn up with stories about their people.

The person who just isn’t quite smart enough, the one who doesn’t take ownership, the person who has plateaued. The conflict avoiders, the ‘emotional’ ones, the ones who frustrate and piss off others … the list goes on. I’ve heard them all before, and until the revolution occurs* no doubt I’ll hear them again.

It’s not that they are wrong. In fact they are right: the patterns exist, there are gaps, and consequences, and the frustration is justified.

But when the other person is the entire explanation, the leadership opportunity is missed.

The leader is always part of the pattern.

What the person presents to the leader is no accident – it asks something important and developmental of the leader (if it wasn’t developmental, they wouldn’t be talking about it – they would have moved beyond it already). It seeks greater skill, higher levels of emotional competence. Humility, courage, clarity, patience, honesty, timing and above all the will to take responsibility for the situation and the change required.

And here is where leaders split

One group wants to ignore this reality. It’s easy, socially acceptable and ‘normal’ to stay focused on the behaviour and skill (or lack of) of the other person. It’s presenting and in a strange sort of way the complaining feels good. Bizarrely productive. Ego-validating: ‘It’s them not me.’ Few will say this out loud but the complaining is a side-effect of lack of responsibility.

That is the home of managing: ‘leaders’ continue to manage the pattern and fool themselves that either it can’t be changed or they are changing it.

For these leaders, hearing they are part of the pattern is an accusation. They rush to defend themselves. They defend, explain, reject, justify, or return immediately to the evidence they have collected about the other person. They want the conversation to stay over there, because if the other person is the limitation, the leader can remain largely unchanged. Easy.

Then there are the others.

They hear the same idea and see only opportunity:

If my leadership is part of the limitation, my leadership is also my leverage

And I’m in control of that ... even if I have no idea yet what to do.

If the way you are seeing, speaking, challenging, avoiding, expecting or relating to someone is shaping what is happening, then change is not sitting outside you. It is not dependent on someone else suddenly becoming easier, more mature, more capable or more self-aware before anything can move.

It is in your hands, right here right now, and that can either feel confronting or completely liberating depending on your relationship with responsibility.

This is foundational to Unmanaged leadership.

Management looks at the person and asks how to deal with them.

Leadership looks at the whole pattern and asks what this requires of me

It’s a big question with an answer that make take a while to reveal itself.

That’s why it’s courageous. It doesn’t exist as a neat equation 1+1=2. It won’t have an answer that you can sum up neatly in a box.

It requires subtle but critical change in you. It may ask you to be more emotionally competent, more precise, more humble, more willing to stop being right and start being useful. It may require you to have the conversation despite your predetermination of the outcome before one word has even been said, stop rescuing, stop softening, stop over-functioning, stop expecting too little, or stop hiding behind the belief that nothing more is possible.

What we never know is what it will ask of you … until you ask yourself the question.

The way a leader receives responsibility tells you a lot about their own potential.

If responsibility shuts them down, their growth will always be limited by their need to stay protected. If responsibility opens them up, growth becomes available immediately, because they can finally ask the question that changes everything: how am I part of what is keeping this here?

That question is an act of leadership.

Leadership is not measured by how accurately you can diagnose someone else’s limitation. Most leaders do that with fluency. Leadership is measured by your willingness to evolve in response to what that limitation asks of you. That is where real impact happens: not from doing more, managing harder, refining the workaround or developing better language for the same complaint, but from becoming more capable of truth, more able to hold discomfort, more willing to see your own part, more skilled in conversation, more courageous in standards held and more open to the possibility that the next level of someone else’s performance requires the next level of your leadership.

Everyone has things currently holding them back. Shortcomings and blind spots. That’s standard.

What’s different is how you are willing to see your current limitations as the birthplace of their change.

After all, in relationships we are in a constant dance with others. Some steps are graceful, others less so, but where there is relationship, we are always dancing together, and we can always get better at it.

My invitation is to ask yourself – where am I blaming someone else because it stops me from examining my own contribution? Where am I managing around a pattern because I haven’t become the leader required to shift it?

Most importantly – do I have the humility to see my own limitation not as failure, but as the biggest opportunity in my hands today?

If you can see opportunity, your next question is, what action will I take?