Extinguishing leadership behaviour is said to demotivate a team – like putting water on a fire. Whether you study leadership or not that can be a painful thing to observe and worse to experience. The ‘fire inside’ individuals weakens, and the energy level among the team members is drained bit by bit. Sadly, it happens a lot especially when managers are not well suited for the job. Which also happens a lot. In most organizations there are heroes who help the team push past the leadership void. And sometimes there are leadership turn arounds where the extinguishing behaviour is discovered and ended.

In large matrixed professional organizations there can be many leadership successes as well as gaps and inconsistencies. Followers increasingly hold their leaders to account including how leaders carry themselves – how they set the tone. Science suggests good followship in a professional setting involves followers asserting themselves. Good leaders get the message but what happens when they don’t? One possibility is that trust for the leader erodes. A feeling of futility among the followers fuels a leadership death spiral and eventually the leader’s messages fall on deaf ears. When a leader is tone deaf to how their team is feeling about their leadership the team finds a new de facto leader for matters not requiring position authority. Follow-to-rule attitudes develop – kind of like work-to-rule but of the heart and mind not the body. As a leader s/he’s “dead to me” becomes more palpable. It stands to reason in this situation that the team’s performance would decline.

There’s another narrative that could emerge from a leader’s failure to spark their followers – when leaders who aren’t leading well do get the message from the assertive unhappy professionals. The starting point for this better leadership story is a leader head-shake and acceptance of the likelihood that something’s wrong and its time to eat some humble pie. The key ingredient here is respect.

When leaders become disconnected from the team and followers show signs of declining trust maybe its time for some simple respectful listening by the leader. “You’ve stopped speaking up. We need you to speak up or we’ll lose the customer perspective. I’m not sure I’m giving you what you need or supporting you the way you need right now. What do you need from me as a leader?”

There’s no script for these situations – they’re all different but the starting point is the realization that, its (probably) you leader! Take a deep breathe and respect the years of experience on your team, especially in a professional setting where the followers often know much more about the core business than you do as leader. If its not your style as leader, if you’re an introvert in a sea of extraverts for example, then get to work on how you can warm up to your team of professionals. Learn and practice listening with respect. Leaders in tough situations like this had better figure it out fast or risk the death spiral of ‘follow-to-rule’ among your team of professionals. Listen, feed the fire, and make it a leadership turnaround instead of becoming ‘dead to them.’