Maintaining Distance as a Leader

Continuing the series on Action Centred Leadership, this blog explores how to maintain an appropriate distance as a leader - being close enough to inspire and support your team, yet detached enough to empower and hold them accountable.

Why Distance Matters

Before getting stuck into into the ideal balance, let's understand why distance is crucial for leaders.

Action Centred Leadership highlights three core responsibilities for a leader: achieving the task, building and maintaining the team, and developing individual members. While every team member contributes to these functions, the leader ultimately bears the accountability. If the project fails, the team disintegrates, or individuals become disengaged, the leader faces the heat.

Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

It's this accountability that drives the importance of maintaining some distance. It allows you to view the broader context, make strategic decisions, and motivate your team without being overwhelmed by daily details. However, complete isolation is equally counterproductive.

Striking The Right Balance

The ideal balance between emphasis and minimization of distance depends on various factors:

Emphasising Distance

Emphasising distance from the team can be useful when initially taking charge of a new team, particularly if the team members knew the individual well before they were appointed. And let's face it, there'll be times when tough calls need making. Distance can be a handy buffer in those situations.

However, it can be bad when there is already an embedded culture of distant leaders, or when they can be trusted not to be over-familiar.

Worth noting, John Adair's thinking on leader distance predates the remote working revolution. So, for those of you managing a scattered team, remember – a touch more closeness might be the order of the day.

Minimising Distance

Minimising the distance between yourself and the team is useful in situations where there is a lack of communication or trust between employees and management, or where everyone in the team, including the leader, are roughly equal in knowledge and experience. However, be mindful, if the team's already a tight-knit bunch, or it comes across as getting a bit too matey, it can backfire.

Balancing Distance

Other than the above, in most cases, some middle ground between emphasising and minimising distance is ideal. It can be necessary when initially taking the lead of an established team to lean one way or the other to correct an established culture, but in any case, it is good to regularly evaluate whether some corrective action would be needed.

Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.

John C. Maxwell

#GoForIt

So there you have it, the art of leader distance. It's a balancing act, but a crucial one. Remember, it's about striking the right chord – close enough to inspire, detached enough to empower. It's about leading from the front, not the back row. So, maintain that distance, and watch your team soar. #GoForIt