Into the Lion's Den: Fierce Kindness and the Commitments Senior Teams Daren't Name

Some years ago I was at a business event, the kind with black ties, flowing champagne and a lot of people keen to talk to the star guest. That star guest was a very successful property developer, and he’d heard what I do. So, standing in a circle of his people, his PR team and the event hosts, he started quizzing me about his senior leadership team.

His questions had a lot of performance in them. His team, he told me (and everyone listening), couldn’t be trusted to deliver if he wasn’t around. There was a knowing laugh from the circle. I thought there was a taste of snideness to his words, aimed at people some of whom weren’t there to answer back. And maybe aimed a little at me too, to see how I’d react.

So I asked him if this was how he ran his team sessions. Whether he made the same kind of half-joking digs there, without ever quite naming what was going on or offering anything that might turn it around. Then I told him that, in my experience, an underperforming senior team was very often a leadership issue. His leadership.

You could have heard a pin drop. He shook my hand, quite firmly, and moved on.

Why I Said It

I’d love to claim some clever tactic, but what was going on for me was much simpler than that. I actually liked this man. I liked his drive and his appetite for risk. I liked the way he’d clearly built something big by refusing to play safe. And I thought someone like that deserved to have a bit of that directness given back to him for a change, because those very qualities probably meant it hardly ever happened. The people around him were far more likely to laugh along.

I also knew perfectly well that even if I wasn’t shown the door of that glitzy event then and there, I might just be quietly left off the guest lists in future.

Fierce Kindness and The Lion’s Den

One of the principles I hold most strongly about coaching, and about working with people generally, is something I call Fierce Kindness. I wrote about it in The 9 Types of Difficult People as a dynamic principle; two qualities that pull against each other and have to be actively held in balance:

The fierce part is the willingness to tackle difficulty head-on, saying clearly and respectfully what you think and what you need, and holding a boundary.
The kind part is listening properly, understanding the other person’s point of view, and offering support.

Fierceness on its own can tip into confrontation, or at least be heard that way. Kindness on its own slides into leniency, and the problem is allowed to carry on.

The image I hold for it is the old story of the lion with a thorn in its paw. Someone has to walk into the den and pull it out. The lion is in pain, it’s dangerous, and it has no way of knowing whether you’ve come to help or to hurt. You go in anyway, because the thorn needs to come out.

This matters for coaches in particular. We ask our clients to take risks all the time, in service of their goals and their own development. Have the difficult conversation we urge them, try the new behaviour, say the thing you’ve been avoiding.

It’s all very well doing good coaching when you, the coach, are risking nothing. But part of the discipline has to be recognising the moments when you must take a risk yourself, for the sake of the person in front of you, even if it’s someone you’ve only just met at a party.

The Thorn in Most Senior Teams

What that star guest was describing is one of the most common things I hear from senior leaders. Decisions get made and then drift. Commitments made at the board table dissolve on the way back to the office. (I wrote about one reason for that, confusion over which team you’re actually on, in an earlier article linked below.) Initiatives are talked about with real energy and never reviewed. Everyone knows a promise wasn’t kept, but nobody says so.

Patrick Lencioni describes this as a cascade. Teams that avoid honest disagreement end up with artificial harmony. Artificial harmony produces commitment that is only skin-deep, because the conversation that would have produced real buy-in never happened. And you can’t hold someone to account for a commitment they never truly made.

In senior teams there’s an extra twist, which is status. Admitting that you haven’t delivered, or telling a peer that they haven’t, puts at risk a standing that people at this level have spent decades building. So the team develops a habit of leaving it unnamed.

The frustration doesn’t go away, though. It leaks out sideways: in the corridor, in the car park, in a comment to someone outside the team. Or, in our star guest’s case, as a joke at a party, told to an audience about people who mostly weren’t there.

That’s the thorn. And a leader grumbling about it is walking round the outside of the den.

What Changed

He rang me about a week later and asked if I’d work with him. An offer I couldn’t refuse.

What made the difference in the coaching turned out to be surprisingly simple. We opened up the team sessions to a direct conversation about what he felt the leadership team needed to deliver, asked out loud with the people who had to deliver it. Alongside that, he and the other members of the team started asking each other a second question …

… what do you need in order to do that?

Those two questions together are fierce kindness in practical form. The first is the fierce part: saying clearly what’s required, to the people who need to hear it, instead of to a circle of onlookers. The second is the kind part: listening properly, assuming people want to deliver, and offering the support to help them do it.

Asked on its own, the first question tends to turn into blame, which is where our star guest had got stuck. Asked on its own, the second becomes a comfortable conversation that changes nothing. Together they made commitments real, because people had said to each other what they’d do and what they’d need, and so they could be held to it.

For You and Your Team

If you’re on a senior team and you know a commitment has slipped but haven’t said so, is that frustrating for you; and where is that frustration coming out? And if you’re a leader who has ever said, even half-jokingly, that your team can’t be trusted to deliver without you, it’s worth asking where you’re saying it, and who you’re saying it to.

Fierce Kindness is a choice about a way of being, and it asks something of us. We might get it wrong. Someone might shake your hand a bit too firmly and walk away. But the thorn is there whether we go into the den or not, and the lion is still in pain.

My experience, over a long career, is that people are far more grateful to the person who walks in than you’d ever expect. Sometimes they even ring you a week later.

More Support and Resources

I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together. My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation is clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership, and better performance.

Into the Lion’s Den: Fierce Kindness and the Commitments Senior Teams Daren’t Name