“Leadership is like manure, it produces the best results when spread around.”— me

Yup, I said that to a CEO with an old world belief in rigid hierarchical management because I needed to shock him into actually hearing what I was saying in order for him to recognize the need to adjust his MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy)™ for today’s workers. I can’t remember reading or hearing it anywhere, so I think it really is original—and definitely true.

There are major advantages to spreading leadership opportunities around and cultivating Paul Wright’s “leadership for instances” (9/17) approach.

Foremost is the fact that if you want to hire these days you need to offer your workers meaningful opportunities to grow or they’ll walk. Growing includes leading and managing—even if it’s only a group of one, themselves.

It means pushing responsibility further and further down in your organization, and not just the responsibility, but also the authority required to accomplish whatever it is.

That’s where most leaders/managers blow it, they assign the task, but then require the person to keep running to them for permission to do each step. Sure, sometimes you shouldn’t hand over total control, but you can hand over enough to get the job done.

Even when it comes to money, which is often the biggest hang-up, you can still do it. Create a budget for that project ad give the responsibility for it to the person you’ve assigned to do it. Let her decide how to spend it without interference or “help” from you—unless she asks. And if she goes over budget don’t freak out. It’s not that much (or shouldn’t be) in the big picture and if you freak she may never recover. She already knows that she messed up, so beating on her will accomplish nothing. Sit down calmly and let her walk you through the thinking and decision-making that led to being over budget, discuss it and lead her through the pattern that would have succeeded.

And if it turns out that the error is yours and the estimate was wrong, admit it, don’t try and convince her that someone else could have done it. People aren’t stupid, she’ll know that the discussion ended as a CYA function for you—as will everyone in your group, since stuff like this never stays secret.

Other great reasons to spread it around are increased productivity, more employee satisfaction, fewer logjams when you’re out sick or traveling, easier staffing and less turnover.

Finally, spread it around because that’s what great leaders/managers do to they foster the growth of the next great leaders/managers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 11:47 am and is filed under About Leadership, management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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