“Do you want the real answer or the ‘husband answer’?”
There’s a meme on social media where couples perform a version of the same joke. It starts with a woman asking her male partner, “What do you think of [my dress, my haircut, something I bought for the house …].” The man responds, “Do you want the real answer or the ‘husband answer’?”
I thought of that joke when my wife emailed me to say that she’d done a personality assessment at work and wanted my view of “whether the results aligned with how you’ve experienced me over the years or if there were any surprises.”
On the first day of my leadership coaching program, the instructors gave us the advice to never coach our spouses. So when Erin asks me questions like this, I usually say, “Do you want the ‘husband answer’ or the ‘coach answer’?” And I only give the coach answer after triple-confirming that she’s open to being challenged. (I’m thinking I should create a written contract for these situations.)
In response to my wife’s question, I wrote, “I doubt you behave the same with me as you do at work.” It’s a true statement, but also a convenient way to avoid giving feedback on a personality question!
Instead, I shared a macro perspective that leadership assessments can be misleading because they are generic. There’s no objective “good” or “bad” leadership—the test is whether a leader’s approach fits the situation.
For example, a friend recently told me that the leaders of her large tech company are all struggling. They rose in a time of exponential company growth where innovation was prized and a let a thousand flowers bloom approach was ideal.
But now that the company is being challenged by strong competitors with AI, leaders are being called to drive focus, be more directive, and sprint to catch up with the competition—a leadership approach that’s both more challenging and less fun for them as individuals.
I’m sure all of those leaders would have scored strongly on their leadership assessments, and they wouldn’t have risen so highly if they hadn’t been given positive ratings as leaders. But it’s the situation that determines whether or not they can be great leaders and whether or not they’ll enjoy the tasks of leadership.
The shift from peacetime to wartime presents perhaps the most stark illustration of the principle that leadership is situational. In The Guns of August, a great book about the dawn of World War I, Barbara Tuchman gives repeated examples of countries faltering because the leaders whose skills enabled them to rise during one era did not translate to the new situation. One tragically funny example was the French military leaders who, on the cusp of war, were more concerned about adherence to their historical uniforms than the new demands of mechanized warfare. Tuchman writes, “At a parliamentary hearing, a former War Minister, M. Etienne, spoke for France. ‘Eliminate the red trousers?’ he cried. ‘Never! Le pantalon rouge c’est la France!’”
Col. David Hackworth makes a similar point about the U.S. Army leadership before the Vietnam War. In About Face, he writes, “The capable combat leader has traits which are inconsistent with today’s criteria for high-level positions. As a result, the men who know how to win in battle, with rare exception, just don’t get ahead. Instead, the second stringers who talk a good game in the shower room and are adroit at fixing the blame on others, succeed.”
Hackworth also claimed that because the Vietnam-era generals had their formative combat experiences in WWII and idolized the star generals from that conflict, their strategic concepts were ill-suited to the situation at hand. He writes, “This force is organized conventionally and thinks conventionally. Its objective has been to fight big multi-battalion battles where generals can display their ‘generalship.’ The net result of this is we have had our ‘clocks cleaned’ in almost every major fight.”
Circling back to my wife, with the concept of situationally defined leadership in mind, I suggested to Erin that she might interpret the result of the leadership assessment using these questions:
How does this match how you want to be as a leader / professional?
How does it match the profile for being successful in your current role?
How does it match the profile for being successful in your aspirational role(s)?
Note that I said all that to be useful while skillfully avoiding direct feedback—the true “husband answer”! 😁
Leadership Wisdom
In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz describes realizing that his leadership style needed to change to fit his company’s situation, which he labeled the difference between peacetime and wartime. He writes, “My greatest management discovery [...] was that peacetime and wartime require radically different management styles. Interestingly, most management books describe peacetime CEO techniques and very few describe wartime.”
Or most colorfully, “Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully.”