The Leadership Paradox: Letting Go to Gain More

In an enterprise, everyone is important, but no one is too important. Its leaders understand this better than anyone, as they know that, by definition, an enduring enterprise must be powered by many and not by one. It must never become overly reliant on any one person, including its leaders.

Thus, as practices progress toward becoming enterprises, their founders and other leaders who may have once been the sole decision-makers usually must face a choice: adopt some form of distributed leadership or prevent the very company in which they invested their time, labor, and heart from advancing and enduring beyond them.

In an organization that embraces distributed leadership, multiple people are empowered to share the responsibilities of leadership. They each add their own expertise and experience to a collaborative leadership team that collectively makes smarter decisions, responds better to opportunities and challenges, and creates more space for a greater number of team members and other stakeholders. “They become a powerful unit of collective performance,” to borrow from Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith’s article “The Discipline of Teams.”

This is not to suggest that there is no hierarchy in such an organization. In a healthy enterprise, everyone must be accountable to someone else, but that is the point: hierarchies are more about ensuring accountability for advancing and protecting the interests of the organization than simply controlling it. In turn, founders and other top leaders of an evolving organization must constantly ask themselves what really motivates their decision-making. Are they making decisions that are best for the organization even if doing so means they are no longer fully in control of everything happening in the organization?

I once had the opportunity to work with Professor Noam Wasserman. In his article “The Founder’s Dilemma,” he argues that “Founders who understand that they are motivated more by control are more prone to making decisions that enable them to lead the business at the expense of increasing its value. They are more likely to … resist deals that affect their management control, and to attract executives who will not threaten their desire to run the company.”

True leadership isn’t about controlling or doing everything. It often requires appropriately creating space for others to lead so that the organization receives the aggregate leadership and guidance it needs to succeed for the long-term. This suggests a paradox: a leader can become even more impactful and more successful by withdrawing and transferring some level of control to other qualified leaders. Conversely, hoarding authority can harm not only the organization but also the leader who hoards it.

So, I have some questions for all my fellow leaders. What do you want for yourself and your company? If your goal is to build a legacy in the form of a sustainable enterprise, are you willing to do what it takes to achieve that goal even if it means ceding some control to others and embracing distributed leadership?

An enterprise must transcend any single person if it is going to endure beyond them. Leaders who cling to personal authority and stardom may find their personal and business growth limited, while those who can shift at least some of their focus to others set the foundation for lasting success. As Malcolm Gladwell puts it, "The system becomes the star." This paradox of leadership – leading by letting go – in many ways defines the successful enterprises of today.