Projecting Isn’t Serving Anyone

When I first became a supervisor, many years ago now, I was ambitious, hungry, and ready to take on the world. I was excited at the new opportunity to be in a formal leadership role. There was only one problem. I misread the room full of my employees and how best to lead them.

The trap I fell into was thinking every other employee was as driven as I was, regardless of where they were in their career. All of my employees of record at the time were older than me and several worked at our respective duty station for many years before I had even started there a couple of years prior.

I started projecting my motivation and initiative onto my employees and trust me, it didn’t exactly go well. Not only was I doing that (to their dismay), but I also wasn’t aware of it initially. Remember, I was trying to prove myself and in doing so, I started to second-guess why I was hired and my abilities in the position as challenges came about.

Here are a few pointers I learned to mitigate this trap:

• Meet people where they are at: Connecting with your employees by learning what they want for themselves and their career will give you context on what’s important to them. You can unearth what motivates them, what skills they need to develop, and how you can best support them with what they are striving to achieve.

• Focus your energy appropriately: Upon reflection, there were healthier options on how to spend my energy. I wasted it on frustration, being annoyed, rumination, and even downright being angry. Redirecting my energy to learning about my employees and focusing on what I could control likely would have centered me in being more effective. Find the modalities to be a contributor and add value rather than undermine yourself.

• It’s not about you: As part of this process, I was hyper focused on my performance and decisions, which resulted in me being worried that if my employees didn’t follow my lead, I was failing as a leader. I needed to re-position onto my employees to help them perform at their best, from wherever they were coming from (see #1).

I have seen this manifest a few times with my various coaching clients and we’ve had deep, rich conversations about how to self-manage in these situations. It is (or can be) frustrating when it feels like your team isn’t quite in sync and you feel stuck in what to do next.

These few starting points can help mitigate some of the less desirable and/or unproductive thought patterns and habits that may come up for you. Taking care of yourself through learning about and understanding your team members may not seem like the way, but if you’re patient and open-minded, things can be much better for everyone in the long run.

Matt Wallat serves as a District Ranger with the National Park Service (NPS) in Colorado. His 20-year career spans eight different NPS units in six different states with assignments in patrol, investigations, program development, court liaison, training officer, and supervisor for 11+ years.

With a strong background in employee development as an agency instructor, Matt continues to evolve with his coaching practice, creating leadership training programs, engaging in curriculum design work, and leading a recent international training program in Tanzania.

He enjoys family time and many other interests including fly fishing, creative DIY projects, music, craft beer and Boston sports.

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