The firm grip

On the moments when the read says clamp

Last week ended with a warning. For four weeks this has been about loosening: your grip on being needed, on being right, on the credit and the doing. But a grip that only ever loosens isn’t a reading. It’s just a different setting.

So start here.

Who on your team knows they’re not delivering, and knows you won’t say anything?

What’s the conversation you’ve been waiting three months for the right moment to have?

When did you last let a standard slide because raising it felt bigger than the problem?

Be honest.

Those are the places your hand has gone soft when the moment needed it firm.

The other half of the reading

Go back to the car park. A small child, their hand loose in yours. Then they spot something on the other side of the car park and go to take off. Your hand shuts, hard. No apology, no discussion, no checking whether they feel empowered.

That clamp isn’t control. It’s the same reading that lets your hand go soft a second later. A leader who can only loosen has lost half the skill, just as surely as a leader who can only clamp.

Plenty of leaders who’ve nodded along with the last four issues don’t have a clamping problem. They have the opposite.

The hands-off leader who holds a failing project like a wine glass and calls the drift empowerment. The one who’d rather quietly redo the work than tell someone it isn’t good enough. The one who saves for the performance review what should have been said in March.

Soft isn’t kind.

When the standard isn’t held, the team doesn’t feel freed. They feel unsure. Does the deadline matter? Is this good enough? Will anyone notice if I don’t? And the people doing the best work watch the person doing the least get away with it, and draw their own conclusions.

What the research found

Researchers in Norway surveyed 2,273 employees about what happens when leaders step back from leading: avoiding decisions, staying out of problems, not there when they’re needed. It wasn’t neutral.1

Under that kind of leadership, people reported more confusion about their roles, more conflicting demands and more conflict with colleagues, and those stressors were in turn linked to more bullying and more distress. The researchers’ conclusion was blunt, they didn’t treat it as an absence of leadership. They called it destructive.

The firm grip, done well

A firm grip isn’t a tight grip on everything. That’s the vice from the first issue. It’s a short, clear clamp on the few things that matter, held without apology, then released.

Be firm on the what, loose on the how. Last week was about handing over the whole thing. This is the other side of that handover: the outcome, the standard and the deadline are clear, agreed, and don’t quietly slide. If one needs to change, you change it out loud.

How they get there is up to them.

Say it early, and say it small. What Jonathan Raymond calls ‘the mention’, the first time a standard slips, takes less than a minute. The one you have after six months takes an HR adviser and a weekend of lying awake. Most hard conversations aren’t hard. They’re late. 2

Say what you saw, not what you think of them. “We agreed you’d have the report finished by Friday, you got it to me Tuesday, that’s the third time” lands differently from “you’re unreliable”. One is a fact they can do something about. The other is a verdict they’ll spend the meeting defending.

Then let go again. The clamp is a moment, not a setting. Once the line is clear, step back and let them meet it. Stay clamped and you’ve just found another way to hold too tight.

Expect it to feel bad. If you’ve been soft for a while, the first firm conversation often goes worse than you hoped. The person is surprised, maybe hurt, because nobody told them sooner. That isn’t proof you got it wrong. It’s the cost of the last six months.

The same move at every level

For a team leader, it’s telling a good performer that the standard they’ve let slip still matters. For a GM, it’s holding a direct report to the number they committed to, instead of quietly covering the gap. For an executive, it’s saying in the leadership team meeting what everyone has already said in the corridor. The higher you go, the more expensive the soft grip gets, because everyone below you is reading it.

One thing this week

Go back to the conversation you’ve been putting off, and have it before Friday. Short, specific, about what you saw. Then let go, and see what they do with it.

Firm when it matters, light when it doesn’t. That’s the reading. But there’s one place where getting it right matters more than anywhere else, because everyone is watching at once: the room. The meeting, the offsite, the leadership team. Hold it too tight and nobody speaks. Too loose and nothing gets decided.

That’s next week.

Hum. The sound of great teams.

1 - Skogstad, A., Einarsen, S., Torsheim, T., Aasland, M. S., & Hetland, H. (2007). The destructiveness of laissez-faire leadership behavior. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(1), 80-92. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.12.1.80

2 - Raymond, J. (2016). Good authority: How to become the leader your team is waiting for. See also: The Accountability Dial, https://jonathanraymond.com/accountability-dial