What Senior Leaders and Junior Team Members Get Wrong About Contribution
31. “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs got it wrong” - Simon Sinek
“Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs got it wrong”.
I was chatting with my friends Michael and Simon. Ok so they aren’t actually my friends. And I wasn’t really chatting with them.
I was driving, and listening to a podcast (what else is new).
They were on the podcast.
“Maslow put food and shelter at 1 and relationships at 3”, Simon Sinek insisted.
I turned up the volume. Car rides have always been where I think best. Well, that and when running. Today was a car ride.
Maslow only accounts for individuals, not groups.
The smeared colors of the New England fall landscape scurried by steadily as I meandered north on 91.
Michael Gervais, a sports psychologist and the host of the Finding Mastery podcast, chuckled as Simon processed in real-time.
“He’s only half right. If you only think of us as individuals, food and shelter absolutely come first, belonging comes later, with self actualization at the top”.
A former boss once gifted me a copy of Simon’s book Leaders Eat Last. I’ve since worked my way through his others and have heard him speak on a variety of business topics over the years.
I’d never heard him share these thoughts.
Sure, I’d heard him tackle the concept of creating workplace trust before. But directly untangling the responsibility of individual needs from team contribution was new and different.
Simon continued, “The problem is we’re also members of groups. Which means, in a community scenario, belonging comes first”.
He rounded out his freshly formed thoughts on Maslow’s misstep, “Food and shelter is probably number 3, and at the top is shared actualization. Which is how we find purpose at work”.
Leaders solve for themselves by focusing on the group & juniors solve for the group by focusing on themselves.
This breaks businesses.
And it creates dysfunction.
People think that stress increases as your career climbs — The Whitehall Study found the opposite to be true.
This conversation with Simon and Michael shifted even more toward validating what I, and many others, have experienced.
I shifted in my seat to prop my elbow on the window and pinch my pointer finger and thumb around the steering wheel’s crossbar. My other hand reached to tap the rewind 15 second button.
The Whitehall study looked to better understand this topic referred to as Executive Stress Syndrome. Interestingly, they found that as you make your way up the ranks, your stress goes down. The reason is that with seniority, you gain agency. Or, the ability to make decisions for yourself.
To choose.
This is the same reason cited by the study that junior level employees are more likely to die of a heart attack than senior level employees.
Lack of agency creates increased stress.
Simon Sinek understands what many, unknowingly, get wrong. He said, “we teach people how to be good at their jobs, but we don’t teach people how to look after other people”.
Then, he summed up the discovery by asking the inevitable question “do I put myself first at the expense of the group, or do I put the group first at the expense of myself — and the answer is ‘yes’”.
Michael Gervais agreeably capped the claim, “We are social beings masquerading as individual contributors”.
He added, “we’re more like a coral reef”.
I’d never thought about it like that.
Producing work without documenting it will flatten you.
You have to make your work visible.
Now humming along 89 north, my mind raced with the passing exits.
Simon and Michael were chatting through the very reason I’d spent the last 10+ years finding ways to overcome impostor syndrome. Feeling flattened by trying to meet the demands of getting ahead.
I wanted to close my laptop at the end of the day without taking the crushing anxiety of the next one with me. I wanted to get enough sleep… to find time to cook healthier meals, to make it through an entire conversation with friends without reviewing my mental checklist. I wanted to read regularly and journal like I’d used to.
In my search for relief, I accidentally created a system that allowed me to take on highly visible projects and get meaningful results.
As Simon talked about how to have hard conversations with team members, I thought of all the ways we set people up to fail.
Most companies I’ve worked for have been disorganized.
Most teams I’ve worked on have been overwhelmed.
Most leaders I’ve worked with have been stressed.
We don’t know all that’s being asked of us.
We don’t know what’s being worked on.
We don’t know where to find updates.
We don’t know who is keeping track.
We don’t know when we’ll know.
Most workloads are hard to see. I thought about it while making out the blurred reds, yellows, and oranges among the passing trees.
The people I’ve worked with will complete a task and immediately grab the next one. They just want to keep up.
Simon’s voice rebounded through my head and back out of my, now open, mouth when he said, “Leadership is not about being in charge. It's about taking care of those in your charge”.
My brakes went to work as I tried not to miss my exit.
Team performance is a reflection of our leadership. Duh, it’s so simple. But I was struck by just how many ignore this part.
The ability to lead others, then, depends on the ability to coach yourself.
Simon suggested unfailing honesty, even in discomfort, when having a conversation with a teammate struggling to keep up “Us having this conversation is more important than me doing it perfectly”.
Then Michael chimed in, “loving the person and coaching the behavior — that’s what you’re talking about?”.
Yep, he was right.
Showing your worth is how you get to act your wage — especially if you’re a remote worker.
Most of us learn that the hard way.
I couldn’t help but wonder, what if we showed people how to swim before we noticed that they’ve sunk? Instead of creating teams of ticket takers, could we help people:
Figure out the impact they’re working to create.
Prioritize the task that will generate the most value toward that goal.
Say no if it doesn’t contribute to the goal.
Making your own task list visible almost always elevates your colleagues. That’s what I’ve found.
Personal project plans are the new “pics or it didn’t happen”.
As Simon and Michael talked about managing employees who can't see the forest for the trees, I thought about the coral reef comment from their discussion about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
An employee flooded with competing tasks will undoubtedly lose sight of the ones needing priority. That’s their manager’s job. To help them focus on the work that moves projects and teams forward.
Focused effort leads to clear progress. And understood expectations become visible outcomes so that measurable results create real impact.
“Centralized tasks are how the best teams kick ass”
-Derek MacDonald, Michael Scott.
Simon welcomed my attention to the destination it’d been approaching, “The hardest thing that every leader will have to deal with at some point, and that a junior person won’t understand until they become more senior, is that the team is more important than any individual on the team”.
I found myself nodding. I’m not sure to who.
Then I wondered how often individuals, protecting their own basic needs, inadvertently fail to help themselves as members of their own team.
Unprotected time quickly becomes overcommitted, then under-delivered.
Simon continued, “It is the last resort to destroy someone’s livelihood for the good of the team. But it is still true that the team is more important than any individual on the team”.
The insight he shared next is why I’ve continued to seek out his thoughts since my first introduction to his school of thought.
Said simply, we have to teach human skills and we have to teach leadership.
“When people join an organization—much like when they join a sports team—we drill into them how to throw, how to catch, how to run; the skills of playing the game. We usually promote people who are good at the game into positions of leadership.
Which is wrong.
As we promote performers, we give them zero education on how to lead. And then we’re surprised when organizations break.”
Many years worth of memories now filled the passenger seats in my truck.
The sunny Vermont sky brightened up the highlight reel of late nigh project planning and weekends of crossed out to-do lists, reformatted deliverables, and schedule-sent emails.
I’d learned the hard way that protecting your time is the key to getting results. And I’d tried to share what I’d learned with my team ever since.
We walked through how to:
Make your work visible.
Write down what tasks you work on.
Describe the outcomes they create.
Connect them to real objectives.
Showing how your work connects clarifies your coworkers tasks, too. I firmly believe that. Even if your boss dismisses your work, your team and stakeholders will be grateful for the documented clarity. Worst case, you’ve built clear interview talking points.
To reach senior level roles and gain more agency, your plan needs to be actionable and descriptive.
It doesn’t need to be big, perfect, or shiny.
Start by sharing visibly with colleagues. Broader awareness across departments and leadership will follow. One becomes the other.
Weekly roundup emails are a great way to practice showing your work. The downside is that doing so will definitely eat up your time. And email updates don’t allow for clean collaboration…they’ll get lost in reply threads.
The best strategy is to have the whole team contribute to one, shared project plan + task queue so it’s clear what everyone is working on. If you don’t have that, create your own.
Document your:
Goal
Objective
Plan
Results
Here’s an example of how to get started.
1. Goal: get a good performance review
Make sure your goal creates the outcome you want.
Why is this your goal?
If achieved, what will the impact look like?
Will you get a promotion? A raise?
What can you do to achieve a good performance review?
2. Objective: complete a project
Make sure your objective contributes to your goal.
Completing a project will provide a track record of your actions and results.
This creates evidence to support your performance during your review.
What do you need to do to make it possible?
3. Plan: make time for project work
Make sure your plan is measurable. Use this to test your plan:
“I know I succeeded because [action] caused [outcome] that resulted in [impact]”
4. Results
Example: “I’ll know I reached my objective because:
I woke up 1hr earlier for 30 days
giving me +1hr each day for the project
creating 20hr/mo of project work I can highlight in my performance review”
Trend lines are how you get meaningful results. They’re created by consistency, not intensity.
Small steps will take you far distances.
Making your work visible is the best way to both cover your ass and get ahead.
Simon and Michael both agreed that it isn’t a leader’s job to grant agency but to create space for it. It’s up to us to exercise our own decision making.
Your ability to make progress is directly tied to your relationship with avoidance.
A good leader invites the group to be part of the process.
A good contributor engages with the group.
Good fences make good neighbors and good communication makes good contributors. Make your work visible. And be sure you have something to communicate.
We don’t move forward until we’re willing to fail and then learn.
It’s you vs. you.
Do what you’ve been avoiding.
You can listen to Simon and Michael’s full conversation here.
talk soon.
Thank for being here. See you next time.
onward.
-dmac
P.S. Click here for ways to grow your business AND reduce the upkeep.