Leaders Enlist, Encourage & Empower

Managers typically, though not always, become managers because they tended to get more, better and/or faster results than their peers. In this respect, they seem to know more and know better than their cohorts.

While this may or may not be true in any given example, there is an overwhelming tendency for managers to manage, at the expense of leadership. What this means, among other self-limiting things, is that most managers have a tendency to believe they know best (or, at least, better) and that, in order to succeed, they must be, and are, "right." Any divergence from what they want, how they want it, is a battle to be won.

In contrast, leaders wisely pick their battles. Leaders know they are right on key things, such as "vision" and organizational "deliverables" and "purpose." Leaders are powerfully confident and unmovable in their abilities, values and purpose.

But leaders also recognize and respect their people's human drives, including their need to "be autonomous, contributory and their need to be right." It's engineered into our brains and our egos: the need to be right.

Leaders realize that it's in everyone's best interest to check their neuro-physiological and egoistic need to "control things" and "to be right" and leaders are careful to pick their battles. Leaders let their people make many of their own choices in how they personally contribute to the culture, deliverables and vision. Of course, while remaining within their job responsibilities.

Micro-managers achieve substandard results in most professions and environments. They alienate their people, succeeding only in keeping the disingenuous "game-players" on their team: those marginal performers who are only interested in playing it safe. Micro-managers also often keep poor performers. Those people who are happy in the comfort that they won't lose their job, because they appease the boss' egotistical need to "be right and in control."

Leaders, however, take the, sometime frightening, risk, of routinely and methodically "giving their people an inch," hopeful and confident that, in their freedom, autonomy and empowerment, their people will "deliver a mile."

If we pick our battles, choosing those that matter and are winable, we position ourselves, our team and our organization to achieve substantial growth, impact and success.