One belief sits underneath almost everything I know about leading a team: to be an effective manager, you also have to be an effective actor.
That can sound fake. It isn't. Acting isn't pretending to be someone you're not. It's deciding, on purpose, who your team needs you to be, and then showing up as that person consistently, especially on the days you don't feel like it.
Every story you tell becomes material
Every story you tell your team becomes part of the character they believe you are. A piece of your own life, the run-in you had on the way into the office, the way you react when a project goes sideways. All of it goes into the persona you're building as their leader, whether you mean it to or not.
So whenever you talk about your own life at work, ask yourself honestly: what persona am I actually shaping right now? Is this the leader I want them to follow?
Actors almost never break character
Managers shouldn't either. Think of your office as a stage, your teammates as your fellow actors, and the rest of the world as your audience.
On my teams, we don't apologize for things we believe in. An unnecessary apology breaks the show. It tells everyone watching that the confidence underneath was an act all along. Mistakes still happen, and when they do, you own them and fix them. But you don't apologize for the direction you chose on purpose. Staying in character isn't about never being wrong. It's about staying committed to your path in front of the people watching you walk it.
Your presence is part of the performance
Early on at Smoke Cartel, we launched a new chat tool where every customer text opened its own Slack channel. In its first week, I happened to see one come in, hopped into the channel, dropped some feedback for the agent, and moved on with my day.
A couple of hours later, my HR manager found me. My stepping into that conversation had rattled the agent badly. They were new, already going through a hard stretch, and the owner of the company appearing mid-conversation read as a verdict on their work. I'd actually thought they were doing well.
I found them later that day and apologized, and meant it. My stepping in was a reflection of me not recognizing that customer service wasn't mine to hold anymore, not a reflection of them. That conversation turned into one of the most important ones I had with anyone on that team, and they stayed for years.
That's the other half of acting: knowing that when you're the boss, you're never just a bystander. Where you show up, and how, is part of the show.
Tell your team who you are before they guess
When I join a new team, I send a letter before the first meeting. Part of it reads, close to verbatim:
"I'm from the American South. We're culturally a bit more confrontational and sassy than most people expect. I'm an emotionally expressive person, but I'm very rarely actually upset."
That's character work. It tells people how to read me before they've had a chance to misread me, and it gives them permission to tell me how they work, too. If you know you come across a certain way, say it out loud first.
A script makes your worst day sound like your best one
The same principle works on a sales floor. A good cold-call script doesn't make a rep sound robotic. It means their worst day still sounds like their best one. A call doesn't need to sound spontaneous to work. It needs to sound like the tenth time you've said it, because it probably is, and that's what makes a prospect trust it.
Leadership is the same. Your team doesn't need you to be inspired every morning. They need you to be consistent every morning.
The stage doesn't go dark when you clock out
I studied service design, and it taught me to think of a business as a play that's always running, in a small theatre where a whisper really does echo. For an e-commerce business, there's no intermission. The website is on stage every hour of every day.
On Smoke Cartel's three-year anniversary, I wrote an open letter to my team. "Smoke Cartel is my team," I wrote. "It is you, reading this letter." Then it ran, further than I'd planned, in the marketing magazine we mailed to every customer who'd bought from us that year. Words written for my own people ended up in thousands of strangers' mailboxes.
I was fine with that, because there was never a separate, more careful version I would have written for customers. That's the real test: would the words you use with your team survive being read by everyone else?
Questions to ask yourself this week
- What persona does my team think I have? Is it the one I'm trying to build?
- What did the last story I told at work teach them about me?
- Where am I apologizing for things I actually believe in?
- Where does my presence change how my team performs, for better or worse?
- Would what I said to my team this week survive being read by our customers?
Want the book when it's ready?
This post is adapted from The Team You Build, the book I'm writing about building a team that will outlast you. Drop your email below and I'll let you know when it's out, along with new posts on operations, e-commerce, and building teams.
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