A leader’s dilemma

Lately, I've been working with several forward-thinking business leaders in leading tech companies. These individuals aspire to embody the principles of servant leadership, yet many find themselves grappling with a perplexing dilemma. On one hand, they hold a deep regard for their people, recognizing their innate creativity, talent, and resourcefulness. Because serving the development of these capacities is their priority, they reject conventional, top-down management approaches in favor of building cultures of trust and empowerment. They believe that by granting autonomy and fostering confidence, the people on their teams will naturally make sound decisions and act responsibly.

However, they keep finding that their optimism is misplaced. When they empower people to lead themselves, make their own decisions, and execute autonomously, only a small percentage of individuals seem able to rise to the occasion. Leaders are struck with the uncomfortable but seemingly inevitable realization that they must segregate their teams into two tiers, the minority who exhibit capacity for self-direction and the majority who, despite their yearning for independence, require traditional guidance and management.

“What other choice do I have?”, one executive confronted me recently. “Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in empowering everyone, but I have a business to run, and some people just don’t seem to have it in them.”

The Blind Spot

The solution to this dilemma is hiding in plain sight: rather than empower people by simply handing them the reins, leaders should instead work on developing them. And by developing I mean something very different than training, coaching, mentoring, or giving feedback. I think of development as a self-determining process that works from the inside out. When development is happening, an individual or an organization discovers the core of who they are and the contribution they are meant to make, and then embarks on a journey to grow the needed capacity and capability to manifest this potential into the world.

I recently had an interaction with a senior executive at a tech giant—let’s call him Chad—that demonstrated pretty clearly both the blind spot and the kind of thinking it takes to make the transition from empowerment to development. Chad recently stepped into his role as vice-president of a division that was working on a critically important product with an aggressive timeline. The organization was a mess, struggling with a blue-sky culture that was strong on ideas but weak on execution and so siloed that the left hand never knew what the right was up to. As a result, the teams were falling far behind schedule, and there was good reason to fear that they wouldn’t be able to deliver what they’d promised to the key client, who had underwritten their work.

Chad knew that he had to shake things up in order to regenerate his organization so that it could work as one cohesive and agile team. He needed to move fast and decisively, but he didn’t want to be a top-down leader. He had done that in his previous company and eventually came to hate it. The very reason he accepted his new position was because the company was committed to a culture of empowerment and growth mindset.

As a progressive leader, Chad decided that the way to lead this change process was to precisely communicate the strategy and roadmap, engage people in understanding and filling in the gaps, and then empower them to run with it. But after several months, this wasn’t working well. Chad voiced his exasperation to me, saying, “My people don’t want to be told what to do, they don’t want to be micromanaged, and I get that, but when I give them the autonomy they supposedly want, they can’t pull it off. Instead, they blame me and my leadership team for being unreasonable and unclear about priorities. I don’t want us to go back to being old-school leaders. It pains me to give up on creativity and intelligence, but we don’t have the luxury of time here.”

I asked Chad what his personal stake was in this endeavor. What did he care about? “Look,” I said, “you have plenty of money and don’t really have to work another day in your life, so what keeps you at it?” Chad was quick to respond: “Two reasons. I believe in my people. And I believe the product we’re working on can revolutionize the industry.” But despite his ideals, Chad was already mentally separating his people into those who have it in them and those who don’t—and concluding that “not having it” was their fault.

Hearing this from a leader always breaks my heart. Chad was unconsciously assuming that people are fixed—that they have a given set of capabilities based on their talents or training and this is what he needed to work with. (Ironically, this assumption was in direct conflict with the company’s stated commitment to growth mindset.)

It was important to challenge this worldview, so I asked Chad why he thought his people, including the so-called low performers, came to work every day. What was their purpose? What mattered to them? Did Chad think that any one of them got up in the morning wishing to just drag through their day, not accomplish much, complain about the leaders, and go home sulking?

On reflection, both Chad and I could agree that, deep down, every single person in the organization wanted to come to work, make a difference, learn, grow, and feel at the end of their workday that this was time well-spent and a day well-lived. Moreover, everyone had the capacity in them, no matter how buried and undeveloped, to make a significant contribution. But even so, many struggled to realize and manifest their distinctive role and contribution at work. “So,” I asked Chad, “now what do you see as your role, if you are to be a leader who strongly believes in people?” He paused to think and then replied, “Growing them from the inside out, helping them realize and develop what's already in them.”

Chad had come to realize that he was expecting his people to work at an entirely different level of ownership, responsibility, decision-making, and self-management than they had been accustomed to. These were new capabilities—new muscles—that they had never had a chance to develop, so it was unfair to expect them to rise to this challenge without providing the developmental infrastructure they needed to succeed.

I prompted him, “Imagine that you are asking your people to go from being morning joggers to running a marathon by giving them a roadmap and empowering them to do it. Would this be sufficient?”

“Of course, not,” he replied. “They’d have to train for it.”

“And,” I suggested, “they’d have to develop not just the functional capabilities and physical muscles.”

“True, they’d also have to develop willpower,” he said, “And other qualities of character, like perseverance and resilience. Plain grit. And I suspect that most of them have some of those, too, when they’re truly self-motivated.”

I could tell that this was a watershed moment for Chad. He suddenly saw that he hadn’t just been missing a puzzle piece. He had failed to grasp the only possible source of any transformation effort that was likely to succeed. “When do we begin?” he asked.

Capability Not Competence or Skill. Development Not Training, Coaching, or Feedback.

At this point, many readers might understandably be wondering how what I’m describing isn’t just commonsense: "Of course I need to invest in coaching my people and building their skills. That’s why we have Learning & Development programs. I coach my managers and encourage them to coach and give feedback to their teams.” Spoiler alert: none of these methods are sufficient to prepare an organization like Chad’s for the challenges it’s up against.

Chad is unusual in that he was immediately able to discern the nature and level of new capacities and capabilities that needed to be built in his organization. He could see that he needed to develop will, character, and complex thinking abilities in his people, not just technical and behavioral skills, and to do so in real time while people worked hard to meet critical deadlines. Any development work he did needed to translate immediately into improved performance. It was clear to him that traditional approaches were not up to the task.

“What would be up to the task?” Chad wanted to know. “If it isn’t about traditional training and feedback, then what is it about? How does a person develop better focus and discipline, or better decision-making and prioritization? Those are the capabilities that are critical to turning around this organization.”

I asked him to reflect for a moment on his own decision-making process. He had to make highly complex and consequential decisions every day, I suggested, decisions that were unfolding in contexts that were dynamic, multi-layered, and full of uncertainty. How did he do it? Chad had to think for a while about this, and he struggled to come up with an answer. Again, this is typical. Research shows that, over time, successful executives like Chad develop mental frameworks and neuropathways that enable them to understand, make sense of, and essentialize complex and dynamic scenarios, recognize patterns, zoom in and out at different levels, manage overload and overwhelm, and stay calm under pressure. They build the mental capacity to make well-thought-out decisions and focus on a small number of consequential places to intervene.

Most of Chad’s complex mental capabilities are innate and invisible to him, and thus they seem impossible to deliberately cultivate in others, a fact that he could immediately appreciate. I explained that such capabilities can be grown through a developmental process that is explicit, structured, and integrated into how people work. In this way, new understanding can be applied immediately, in real time, and people can support one another in the effort. A process like this also allows people to shorten by years, if not decades, the time they would ordinarily spend haphazardly acquiring these capabilities by climbing the career ladder. Their organizations would begin to see and realize the benefits very quickly.

Once Chad understood the principle of the approach—that in a developmental process people grow themselves from the inside out, unlike training or coaching, which attempt to implant skills from the outside in— he wanted to understand the whole of it. What capabilities would his team be developing, and why? What else would they need to pay attention to? What was the framework that gave structure and coherence to the overall work?

The Framework

I am part of a network of change practitioners that have been experimenting and evolving a developmental approach to leadership for over five decades. One of the things that we have discovered is that tapping into the real power in an organization—the intelligence, commitment, creativity, and agency of its people—requires it to be willing to evolve in three distinct but interrelated ways.

First, everyone at every level in the organization is engaged to grow the mind of a CEO, the ability to see the whole of what they are working on, how this relates to the larger world that they are part of, and the implications for any activity that they are engaged in. In practice, this translates into developing whole-business thinking, the capacity to be self-managing, and the ability to work backwards from customer and industry effects.

Second, the organization evolves a self-directed leadership culture where, instead of waiting for direction, everyone takes full responsibility for leading themselves, guided by the principles, strategies, and overall direction that give the whole business coherence.

Third, everyone develops awareness of the lives and purposes of the customers, users, or beneficiaries that the organization serves, along with the emerging dynamics within its industry. This involves understanding the sources behind the needs and aspirations of customers, which enables people to anticipate and meet customers where they are going, rather than where they’ve been. An organization with this kind of capacity moves to the leading edge of its industry, able to innovate and disrupt rather than play catchup on the innovations of others.

Once I had laid this out, Chad could immediately see that working on developing the mind of a CEO in his people was where he needed to start. He asked me to help him understand it in more depth. I was happy to do so, because I wanted to make sure that we tested it thoroughly before committing to working together.

It is a complex capability, involving three dimensions:

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We took a critical project in Chad’s organization and asked what would be different if the team members developed these capabilities? He could see that they would be able to:

• Make decisions that consider the whole business, rather than silo their thinking or wait for direction from above (whole-business mind)
• Take greater ownership and accountability for the project, its deadlines, and its deliverables (self-managing capability)
• Become better at prioritizing and focusing on the features with potential to make the biggest difference for the customer (customer-centered focus)

We also tested some recent shortfalls against this framework. For example, a VP who was one of Chad’s direct reports complained that a team had announced they were slipping their project by two weeks. The VP was understandably upset, but what he found most infuriating was the team’s casual attitude. Clearly, they lacked a sense of ownership for the project as a whole and the impact that their decision was going to have on their colleagues. They also seemed to feel no accountability for the impact on the customer’s ability to continue its own work. It was clear to us that this slip would have been far less likely had the team had an opportunity to develop the mind of a CEO. In this context, the VP also gained a new perspective on his role: transitioning from a disciplinary stance towards developing the mind of a CEO across the his entire team.

Conclusion

Forward-thinking leaders who want to tap into their people’s innate creativity, intelligence, and leadership capacity have a blind spot. They assume that by empowering employees with trust, autonomy, and coaching, they will naturally make sound decisions, act responsibly, and deliver outstanding results. What they miss is the critical importance of processes for developing new capacity and capability—the mind of a CEO—in all employees at every level of the organization, within a culture of evolving, self-directed leadership, and with consciousness of the larger systems that the business serves. When these are developed, the business has strong potential to become an innovation powerhouse, a disruptive force for good in its industry, and a non-displaceable strategic partner in its customers’ lives.