Pushing (Job) Boundaries | Customers, Etc.
How much should you challenge a new role, before you’re even hired?
This is the second post in a short series about adaptive leadership and thinking in systems. The first post was called Revisiting Systems Thinking.
This is always a weird thing to hear after a job interview:
“After meeting you, we’re thinking about this role completely differently.”
Is that… good?
Sometimes these conversations go your way. After interviewing you, the role gets properly scoped to the (newly understood) needs of the business, and you get brought in at the right level to do the job.
But it could also potentially work against you. After interviewing you, perhaps they start thinking differently about the role, but they’ve already met several candidates who fit the original job description. Now they’re left if decide if they should go with someone who cleanly checks all the boxes in the job description, or if they should go with you, who checked certain boxes, but also raised questions about why certain boxes needed to be checked at all.
I first wrote about The Practice of Adaptive Leadership in my post on The Illusion of the Broken System. When re-reading a section of the book recently, I was struck by this section:
In any of your roles, whether parent or CEO or doctor or consultant, you have a specific scope of authority (see figure 2-2) that derives from your authorizers’ expectations and that defines the limits of what you are expected to do. As long as you do what is expected of you, your authorizers are happy. If you do what you are supposed to do really well, you will be rewarded in the coin of the realm, whatever it is: a pay raise, a bonus, a bigger job, a plaque, a more impressive title, a better office.
Here’s Figure 2-2:
Reading that section, I immediately thought about the hiring process. What’s inside that circle? That circle represents your job, your function, the reason the company would hire you. This is your formal authority. But it also has your informal authority, everything else that gives you authority for carrying out your responsibilities. It could be your charisma, your management capabilities, your intellect, even your moral authority.
Nothing we’ve mentioned so far has touched on adaptive leadership, the parts on the edge of the circle, where if you get beyond that, you risk challenging expectations and being labeled “not a fit”. We’re still in the realm of authority, not leadership. And yet:
And one of the most seductive ways your organization rewards you for doing exactly what it wants—to provide operational excellence in executing directions set by others—is to call you a “leader.” Because you, like most people, aspire to have that label, conferring it on you is a brilliant way of keeping you right where the organization wants you, in the middle of your scope of authority and far away from taking on adaptive leadership work.
I find this fascinating. If you’re interviewing for a job and you hear, “you got us to think about the role in entirely new ways”, that may be a sign that you’re demonstrating adaptive leadership. And you haven’t even started the job!
I want to be careful not to over-generalize the learning here. You could up challenging the definition of a role that doesn’t need to be challenged. If a hospital is hiring a heart surgeon because they can’t keep up with heart surgeries, the job interview may not be the proper time to convince them that the real long term solution is to reduce the risk of heart disease in the broader population. Sometimes the job is just the job.
On the other hand, if you’re interviewing for a (positional) leadership role at a growing venture-backed tech company, it’s quite possible that the company may not know exactly what it wants, even if the job description seems rather clear. In that case, it can be helpful to work with the company before you’re hired to challenge the job description and clarify the role.
Adaptive leadership is not about meeting or exceeding your authorizers’ expectations; it is about challenging some of those expectations, finding a way to disappoint people without pushing them completely over the edge. And it requires managing the resistance you will inevitably trigger. When you exercise adaptive leadership, your authorizers will push back, understandably. They hired you, or voted for you, or authorized you to do one thing, and now you are doing something else: you are challenging the status quo, raising a taboo issue, pointing out contradictions between what people say they value and what they actually value. You are scaring people. They may want to get rid of you and find someone else who will do their bidding.
Hearing “you made us think differently about that role” isn’t an indication of success or failure. Perhaps the role was clearly defined and didn’t need to be challenged. But perhaps it's a testament to your ability to provide a fresh perspective, to question norms, and to engage in adaptive leadership. Remember, adaptive leadership isn’t about just fitting in; it's about understanding when to challenge and when to conform, always with the aim of achieving a better outcome for everyone involved. So the next time you hear such feedback, take it as a sign that you’re flexing your adaptive leadership muscles, regardless of the immediate outcome.