Is the leadership thing taking us in the right direction?

Real change doesn’t start in the corner office.

Want to disempower someone? Just tell them exactly what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Don’t tell them why it needs to be done. Avoid any reference to the importance of their input, and never ask if they have any ideas on how it might be done differently.

Command and control had a good run through the industrial revolution. It didn’t start running out of steam until the middle of last century. Even today it persists as a leadership option, often clothed in jargon about complexity and the need for simplicity. Got a problem? Don’t worry; we’ll sort it out with a new policy.

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Three steps to avoid micromanaging

Help people get on with it.

Here’s a quote from management professor, Henry Mintzberg: “The manager does not leave the telephone, the meeting, or the email to get back to work. These contacts are the work.”

Most managers will relate to that. On the one hand, the flow of interruptions, requests and enquiries is a source of constant frustration. On the other, constant communication is at the center of successfully running any team or any business.

What’s the right perspective on this? 

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Management confidence: the 6/24 Factor

The power of being you

Let’s just say there are only 24 things that people are good at. There may be more, maybe less, but when I make a list of those things, I tend to run out of steam around two dozen.

The list might include athleticism or empathy, mathematical competence or organisational skills, strategic thinking or the ability to concentrate, just to mention six.

Of those, I’m only good at two.

Overall in life, I probably do OK in a few more – in total, maybe five or six. Those are what drove my career. They generated most of the success I had along the way. Six out of 24.  Twenty-five percent. That’s what it took.

When did I fail most?

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Want a more collaborative enterprise?

Make a simple start: encourage joint responsibility.

Collaboration might be the buzz word of the moment but “command and control” is still around in management behavior. It sort of goes with the territory. If you are in charge, you figure you have to lead from the front.

It’s a hard model to break. Even if you practice that core management skill – effective delegation – you invariably just delegate the right to command and control to some other person.

You tell them what you want, give them the responsibility and the requisite power and let them get on with it. Individual responsibility, rather than shared responsibility, is often embedded in business culture. This kind of delegation perpetuates it.

Try something different.

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Struggling with tough times? Try leadership

UPDATE March 2020: I wrote this a decade ago in the midst of recession. Covid 19 may well take us into another downturn but the role of the leader hasn't changed.

A case for crisis management?

Taking off on a short flight 20 years ago, our plane lost part of its landing gear. There was a loud explosion; the aircraft listed violently. We knew something was wrong, although we didn’t know what. 

Within minutes, the pilot explained the next move. He would circle the airport while the debris on the tarmac was examined. Engineers with binoculars would assess the state of the undercarriage. He promised an update shortly.

The comfort of clarity

I can’t stress how comforting it was to simply be told that he was on it. He was calm and he was initiating a process. We were no longer quite so much in the dark. His next broadcast was both good news and bad news: the starboard wheels had fallen off, but everything else was working.

The plan? We would continue to our destination. We were already airborne and we had to land somewhere. It might as well be where we were going.

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