How To Challenge Your Leadership Abilities & See How You Diminish
By: Leon Purton
Tags: Leadership, Work, Self, Improvement, Diminisher

How To Challenge Your Leadership Abilities & See How You Diminish

What I learned about improving my impact on a team from Liz Wiseman’s study of accidentally bad leaders

I was in a meeting in a different organisation recently and noted that the team in the room felt really low on energy, in fact the only one in the room that seemed energised was the person talking the most. I realised that this person was the ‘leader’ of the team and that it seemed that their personality was smothering the room, they were limiting debate, and only selecting one or two people to ask their opinions on their decisions (once they had already been made by them). This person was creating a team where they were the most important person, they believed they were the smartest and needed to fix all the problems and make all the decisions otherwise it wouldn’t be right.

On reflection, I realised what I was seeing was something that Liz Wiseman described in her book Multipliers where she describes multiplying leadership and diminishing leadership. Using the leadership framework she developed, the role of a leader has five distinct facets. These facets relate to; creating the right work climate, setting direction, managing their team’s talents, making appropriate decisions, and delivering results. In using this framework, she then delineated leadership along a continuum from a ‘Diminisher’ to ‘Multiplier’.

Reflecting on this book and her construct, I realised that the person leading that conversation, and perhaps unintentionally/or with their best intentions, were diminishing the abilities of their team.

This may have been learnt from their mentors or role models, they may have seen success using these techniques before, or they may have really low trust in their teams in being able to do a good enough job. Either way, they were not getting the best out of their team.

So what separates a multiplier from a diminisher? Liz describes the types of accidental diminishing against each of those leadership categories in the below figure.

Liz Wiseman characterises the differences between Diminisher’s and Multipliers across five characteristics

When I look over her list of archetypes and their attributes, I realise that I have tended to be a bit of a problem solver (which is accidental diminishing behaviour related to being a Rescuer), stepping in when I see things drifting of track or fixing other people’s problems for them. I try not to be, but tend to get frustrated that the team isn’t going to come up with an answer that fits what I think is needed. Then I realise that perhaps instead of fixing it, or correcting them, I need to give them some additional information and invest in them succeeding. This is something that I am working on improving. However, I also realise that I am getting better at getting the best out of people and challenging them to stretch.

We all have an opportunity to assess ourselves and look for opportunities to create multiplier environments, become multiplying leaders. If we do this, we get more engaged teams, producing better results and in a happier environment.

On her webpage she has a heap of free resources, including a quiz to see if you are an accidental dimisher (by the way I think it sets out to make a point that we all have diminishing tendencies — good marketing 😉 — but still useful). She has also set a 30-day Multiplier challenge on the website that contains a heap of good information and a free chapter of her book that outlines how to deal with Diminsher’s (it’s good). I completed the quiz — see what it taught me below.