When you’re in a position of #leadership, there are a lot of things that feel counterintuitive. A lot of your “natural” responses will be wrong.

When something goes wrong, you may get upset, frustrated, or angry. This was “fine” when you were an IC, but *fatal* when you’re a leader. This trains people to not tell you when things go wrong, and every single time it happens it will have ripple effects that will last for years.

Take a breath. You don’t need to solve this instantly. If you need to, try, “Thank you for telling me this. Give me a second to digest things before we move forward,” then take a walk around the block, or scream into a pillow behind closed doors, or whatever. But your public-facing response, and your response to the person who told you whatever catastrophic news is positive, grateful, constructive. Because you *want* people to come to you with bad news, from small bad news to company-destroying catastrophic news. And if they’re scared of your response, they’ll hide bad news from you until it’s too late. So even if you can’t do it in “real-time”, ask for a moment to process things, go freak out in private, and then come back ready to solve problems.

This is hard to do. You will fail at it, and freak out in public. That’s alright. It happens. But do your best to keep your responses in check, because this is genuinely one of the most important things you can do as a leader – be open and positive and constructive when you get terrible, terrible news from your team.

This doesn’t mean you can’t hold people to account. It just means that you do it *after* you’ve addressed the immediate crisis. Because often the problem isn’t quite where you think it is, and the problem is rarely with the messenger.

So yeah – that’s the big one, but the obvious one. For one that’s weirder and less obvious (and will make you a bit paranoid until you learn to live with it)…

When you tell jokes, people laugh. This is feedback that tells you you’re funny! People like you! You should tell more jokes!

But laughter is sometimes a genuine response to humor… and sometimes it’s a social signal that you’re in the in-crowd. Yeah – people are laughing not (just, maybe?) because you’re funny, but because you have *power*. And it’s really easy to overlook this, because it *feels* good. People listen to you. They pay attention. Because you have good ideas, and are charismatic… and(or?) you have power.

You feel validated in speaking up, because people listen. They respond. They laugh. So you speak up more. You interject. The feedback encourages you to do more.

But a lot of this feedback is social validation of your *power*, not (just?) the quality of your ideas or humor.

What do you do about that? Nothing. Just keep it in mind. Question whether you need to talk or not. Whether the positive feedback you’re getting is because your ideas are good, or because you happen to be up in the hierarchy. If that’s all you do, you’ll do a better job than most.