Being the leader means you make the decisions, right? You’re in control, aren’t you?
That depends on how good a leader you want to be. Oddly enough, a good leader makes far fewer decisions than you’d imagine would be necessary, unless you had lived through the tortuous metamorphosis from a Caterpillar of Control to a Butterfly of a Boss. True leadership is developing people to be increasingly capable of making the decisions that you used to have to make.
I know this painfully well personally. I used to do the backlog and cash flow projections myself at my consulting company years ago, even when we grew over from just me to thirty staff members, including a finance manager. Finally one day, Jackie physically pulled the report out of my death grip and said, “I’ll be doing this from now on. You go do things that I can’t.” My life got easier after that, because I learned to trust her, guide her when she needed it, and let her do it differently than I would have. And I focused, as she said, on contributing to the company in ways that she and others were not able to. Yet.
I then began to experiment with different ways of leading people in work teams. I allowed more involvement for those who wished it, especially about things they were passionate about. And what happened is that they were willing to contribute more. Someone who loved to write became the company newsletter editor and publisher. Another person who wanted to learn how to design curricula for our leadership development programs became the dean of the Learning Center. The staff member who saw how the internet would be essential to our business became the web master.
By inviting participation, a leader gets more done, not less. And with less time spent or resources applied. By teaching people how to make their own decisions, over time the leader has to make fewer and fewer of them. And that is absolutely essential if the leader is going to have the time to look far enough ahead to set the course of the department, the division or the entire company. A good leader makes fewer decisions, but the ones the leader does make are absolutely critical to the long-term viability of the business, and cannot be delegated.
Often times, strong individual contributors are given managerial duties and they struggle with this concept. They feel that the tasks are critical and that no one else can do it as well. And they have gotten a lot of recognition for being the person who was accountable for the tangible results. Strong individual contributors have a difficult time trusting their careers to other people. That’s what it feels like they are doing. Because that’s exactly what they are doing.
When a leader has staff who depend on her, she is actually more dependent upon them, than they are upon her. If they choose not to work hard, produce good results and support the directions of the leader, the leader is, well, hosed. So the strong individual contributor who is now a leader, has difficulty trusting other people with her future. A real dilemma. Can’t succeed without trusting other people. Can’t trust other people because it’s risky.
If the Caterpillar of Control is to ever have a chance to fly, she must accept that being a leader is scary. It’s not for the faint of heart. It is a distinctly separate profession from whatever the leader used to do as an individual. It takes study and experience to do well. But it starts with realizing that if a leader is making all the decisions, he is not really a leader, no matter what is on the business card.