Why leaders should give up control and take on responsibility in a digital world (Sheryl Sandberg commented by me)

"There is no such thing as complete control - and when you take full responsibility, that is the most empowering thing that you can do at any stage".

I have been struggling a lot throughout my career with letting go of a bit of control - controlling my teams, controlling my KPIs, controlling the future - and I was always outsourcing the responsibility for what I couldn't control to external factors - I would blame the market, the customer, my colleagues, my teams and so on. But, as you can already guess, I was inevitably getting extremely frustrated as I never seemed to get it right.?

That's when I came across this quote by Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook - or maybe I should already call it Meta - that made me understand that my addiction to control was likely always going to frustrate me, unless I would take on some responsibility for what I couldn't control.?

And this is the quote with which I open this article, which is a transcript of the 5th episode of my Podcast, Metanoia Club - an episode in which we will talk about why you should give up control and take on responsibility in a Digital world, about Sheryl Sandberg.

Sheryl is the chief operating officer (COO) of Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, and the founder of LeanIn.Org. In June 2012, she was elected to Facebook's board of directors, becoming the first woman to serve on its board. Prior to joining Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google, and was involved in its philanthropic arm Google.org. Before that, Sandberg served as chief of staff for United States Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers. In December 2010, she gave a very famous TED speech titled "Why we have too few women leaders.", which eventually contributed to the writing of her first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. The book concerns business leadership and development, issues with the lack of women in government and business leadership positions, and feminism. Also, she co-wrote a second book, Option B, with Adam Grant in? 2017, which puts emphasis on grief and resilience in challenges within life: in it, she talks openly about the early loss of her husband. Yes, in 2004, she married Dave Goldberg, then an executive with Yahoo! and later CEO of SurveyMonkey, who unfortunately On May 1, 2015, died unexpectedly.?

In a way, that taught her that life is very unpredictable, which implies we cannot have full control over it. The same thing applies to our businesses - but the funny part is that we deal with them in exactly the opposite way: we cling to control, although we don't have it. And since Sheryl is a strong advocate of this change of paradigm, here we go with Sheryl Sandberg explaining to us why we should give up control and take on responsibility in a Digital world:

"There is no such thing as complete control. Nothing. No one has complete control in any situation. People that lead organizations in some ways have less, because not only they have to control what they do, they have to persuade everyone else about what they do. But if you're able to take responsibility, for example: "I am not late because there was traffic, I am late because I didn't leave early enough to account for the fact that there was traffic". "Not the project didn't get finished because my partner didn't do his part, but the project didn't get finished because I didn't set up a team where my colleague wanted to do his part". When you take responsibility, and take full responsibility, that is the most empowering thing that you can do at any stage".?

On January 13, 2012, a cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, had just left off the coast in Civitavecchia, close to Rome, and was quickly getting too close to Isola del Giglio , the beautiful Giglio Island, off the coast of Tuscany. The captain, namely Captain Schettino, was doing what in Italian sailing jargon is called "saluto", which means getting dangerously close to the coast in order to salute other mariners on that coast.

According to reconstructions of the event we are going to describe now and that many of you already guessed or maybe even recalled, Schettino was in good company with a beautiful woman and wanted to impress her.?

Well, he definitely didn't succeed in that, and neither impressed the passengers nor the Coast Guard. What happened is that he got so close to the coast that he hit the ship with an unnoticed rock, and then chaos ensued: the ship started to sink, in what eventually came to be a disaster that would cost the lives of 32 cruise passengers. The images were shocking to watch, and I recall them all over the news on Italian television, and across the world.?

But besides the wreck itself, Schettino did something else that should never be done and that breaks any maritime code of conduct: he abandoned the ship almost immediately after the wreck, leaving the vast majority of passengers on board. This could be never done by a captain, on no occasions. He eventually claimed later on that abandoning the ship was never his intention, but that he slipped off the ship while he was helping the rescue operations, and that coincidentally fell into a rescue boat, so that he couldn't help being rescued although he didn't want to...okaaay. Yes, Schettino, you know that no one believes you, right?

There's actually an incredible audio excerpt of a phone call between the head of the Italian Coast Guard and Schettino, where he gets scolded the hard way...more than deserved! Listen up.

Now, so that we don't only talk about the bad example given by Italian captains, I want to , talk about Gennaro Arma, the Diamond Princess cruise that for who might recall, it was docked and prohibited to disembark its passengers in Japan because of a Covid-19 crisis on board, right at the beginning of the pandemics. Gennaro obviously has been the last to leave the ship after the 27 days in which it stayed under quarantine stranded in the Yokohama port.? Who can recall this case? The ship was put in quarantine, and the truth is that, although it's worth a praise, captain Gennaro Arma didn't do anything special, beyond his duty. What he did was nothing more than an obligation. As per Schettino, I don't even want to imagine what his reaction in this situation would have been like.?

See? There's a rule for which, almost a law of honor, the captain is always the last to leave a ship. Always. No exceptions.

And I want you to think about something now: do you think the captain has control of everything that happens on that boat? Of course not, he can't just control so many people, and so many variables. But still, he takes responsibility for everything that takes place on the ship up to the point that his teams and passengers feel safer because of the fact that he will be the last to leave: the fact that the captain is taking on responsibility also for what he or she does not control, is a powerful catalyst of trust.

See: a ship eventually is not so different from a company. It has countless mechanisms (or, in the corporate world, strategies and processes), rooms (or, within companies, areas and departments), crew (or employees), and passengers (or customers). really, it is not so different!?

This is why corporate leaders are not very different from a captain of a ship, and the same thing applies to us: you don't have control over everything, but you have to take responsibility for everything - or at least most of the things, even if you can't control all of them, or let me say: especially if you don't control them (and I'll explain what I mean in a minute).

The funny part? We tend to do exactly the opposite: we cling to control, and we outsource to third parties the responsibility for what we can't control.?

Let me explain how this works through a Sufi tale that says that Once upon a time there was a man named Nasrudin. Some thought he was a very silly man. One day Nasrudin was outside his house, and he was on his hands and knees frantically searching for something under a lamppost, when his friend passed by and asked him what he was looking for. "My key" he said to his friend, "I lost the key to my house". His friend, being a nice person, also got down on his hands and knees and tried to help him look. Some time passed, and eventually it was so dark they could barely see each other, when his friend asked him where he had lost his key. "I lost it over there, in that rice field", Nasrudin replied. So the neighbor replied: "If you lost your key over there", he asked him very confused, "then why are we looking for it here?". That's when Nasrudin said candidly: "It is because here is where the light is, and it's easier to search".?

See?

We often look for the answers to things or make decisions where we feel in control, but the truth is that oftentimes, the real answers are out there, where there's no light, in that rice field in which the only way to get there is taking on responsibility for what you can't control.

Oftentimes this paradox is called the "streetlight effect", and it is a great metaphor of the fact that leaders - and not only, we can include here scientists, historians, and so on - all tend to seek the truth where the process of seeking is easy, rather than where truth is.?

Ok, but we got to a point now where you'd be like:? why is it so important for the leader to take on responsibility? What's the impact of it?

1.First of all, it aligns interests towards the best outcome for the business. Who is familiar with the concept of "Skin in the Game"? Well, it is a concept made popular by economist Nassim Taleb, with his omonimous book, which says that players (meaning leaders in a company, or investors, or stakeholders as a whole) share risk by putting resources in the business or in the project, become more accountable for them. And basically, if it makes you more accountable for your actions and possible outcomes, it means it makes you more responsible for them, and usually this leads to better outcomes.

See, there's a great recent study by Kevin Rooke, an author and blogger, that clearly describes the positive correlation between Tesla's positive results and Elon Musk's skin in the game, when compared to other automotive leaders' lack of skin in the game, and their poor performance. He studied the incentives driving America’s auto CEOs and used four ‘metrics’ to help me understand how well CEO incentives are aligned to shareholder incentives.

1. CEO Equity

2. CEO Trading

3. CEO Pay

4. CEO Reputation

I won't get into details into Kevin's study, which I highly recommend reading though (it's called Skin In The Game: Tesla vs. Ford and GM). But I want to show at least the first metric: CEO equity. We really want to know how much of the company the CEO owns, and whether that ownership makes up a good chunk of the company equity. Both Ford and GM are run by CEOs who own miniscule portions of the company, having inherited the CEO role without much equity. Tesla on the other hand, is being run by a CEO founder who is the company’s largest shareholder

Ford CEO James Hackett Owns 871,074 Shares as of Feb 1, 2019 ($8.2 million USD). This is equal to 0.02% of Ford’s market cap.

GM CEO Mary Barra Owns 3,703,390 Shares as of April 1, 2019 ($135.4 million USD). This is equal to 0.26% of GM’s market cap.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk Owns 38,572,790 Shares As of Feb 14, 2019 ($16.6 billion USD). This is equal to 21.2% of Tesla’s market cap.

Also, Elon Musk is the only one of them that bought shares in 2019 (that is the reference year in the study), increasing his skin in the game.?

Today Tesla's market cap is over 1 trillion USD and is bigger than its top 5 competitors combined, so that we can conclude as a first insight here is that you get better results and outcomes by taking responsibility with your skin in the game, and not just by using control.

2. Second, taking responsibility creates what Simon Sinek calls a Circle of Safety, namely a work environment where people feel safe because of the fact that they are being judged only by their work, and that they can take risks because their managers and leaders are taking responsibility on their behalf.

The truth is that because of the fact that employees don't have 100% control over their work, this situation can generate fear, frustration, and aversion to taking risks.

But as long as you have a leader who assures you that they are taking responsibility for your output too, you work in a Circle of Safety.

Actually, there's a great saying attributed to Lao Tzu, that says: “If you fail to honor your people, They will fail to honor you; It is said of a good leader that When the work is done, the aim fulfilled, The people will say, “We did this ourselves.”

To show how this works, nothing better than the Window and Mirror mechanism that Jim Collins, my favorite author about leadership, describes in his book "Good to Great" being a behavior used by what he calls Level 5 Leaders, namely leaders of companies that outperformed their competitors in terms of returns to investors.

It goes like this: narcissistic leaders do the following: When things go wrong they look out the window at their people and point the finger. When things go right, they look in the mirror at themselves and point the finger and ensure all the credit goes to them. Now, Level 5 leaders do exactly the opposite: : Level 5 leaders look out of a window when things go well, giving credit to their teams (and when they don't have a person they can give credit to, credit luck...which is amazing because it's an admission that yes, things can't always be 100% under control and luck, timing, or fate - whatever you want to call it -? also plays a role in business), while they look in a mirror when things go wrong, taking responsibility and never outsourcing on others or on luck when things go wrong.

To me, this is a perfect summary of the relationship between responsibility and control: the best leaders, with a great exercise in vulnerability, admit not having control of everything, but taking on even more responsibility when things don't go well! This makes you feel safe at work, and the obvious consequence is more engagement.?

Though, we often associate the leader with a robot, with a cold-blooded cyborg who has no emotions, fears, and flaws. This is because we inherited a leadership style based on control, where showing lack of control is still a taboo among C-levels in traditional companies.

But leaders are human too, they are vulnerable, and they get frustrated...oh yes, they get frustrated! I've felt a lot of that in the past, and even today, leading teams, and it made me think if we shouldn't really learn to invert this control-responsibility relation.

Eventually, CEOs also always have someone to report to, namely the Board. And Boards too have to report to investors. And investors, to their other investors, or even families at times, In other words, we always have someone to report to, regardless of the level of the company - namely, someone we have to show we take responsibility.

Let's say you are a sales manager having teams scattered across the whole Mid-west of the United States: can you have control of all of them, of all their schedules, of 100% of their output and results? Obviously not. But are you RESPONSIBLE for that? Obviously, and you are well paid for that (well, that depends on the company).

Let's say that you are a marketing manager who used to control all of your team's starting time and end time in the office, so that you could supposedly check their productivity, and then Covid came, and all teams started working remotely: could you check exactly what they were doing during the day? Obviously not.?

You could still use the same tactics on Teams, yes, checking when they are online, but will this use of harsh control be of any good, or might it backfire?

Let me tell you straight: it will backfire. And I can tell you because I've gone through this: about 10 years ago, I started as a sales manager at Groupon, in Brazil. I had no management nor leadership experience, and I was so insecure that I had to have every activity from my team under control. I came up with this formula that if they would do 20 calls per day, send 20 emails, and have 4 in person meetings, according to my estimates, they would be able to reach their sales target. I am an economist, after all, and this made a lot of sense, on paper. By the end of each day, I was checking all my team's activities on Salesforce, and I would ask to whom didn't reach his or her goals why they didn't.?

Do you think this worked?

The funny part is that apparently yes, it did! The numbers started to increase, and some of them seemed at first to be super productive. But then I started to have a suspicion that they'd fake some of these activities, and like a detective, I started to call restaurants where supposedly my team went, and discovered that in some cases, they had never even set foot in there.?

I got furious, I thought: "My team is showing no respect for my leadership: this is a total lack of trust". And I started to confront the responsibles (of course, it wasn't all of them), and I told them: "You breached my trust", and the surprising answer was "No, Andrea, the first one to breach trust was you, by having to control and micromanage everything we do. You have been showing you don't trust us".?

Okay? I paused for a moment, and thought "No, their behavior is in no way justifiable. But let me think what I could have done wrong here". That's when instead of just thinking "they're breaking my trust because they're lying about the meetings," I started to ask myself, "What are the wrong foundations that I have built for them to behave like this?". Because eventually, I am the leader: I am responsible for their behavior.?

It's like Sheryl Sandberg says, “The project wasn't finished because my friend didn't do his part. In fact, the project was not completed because I didn't set up a team that my colleague might want to be part of.” It's the same thing!

What was the wrong foundation? It was the productivity formula that I created, without understanding that several contracts could be closed without an in-person meeting, but on the phone, as well as that sometimes they'd just want to make less calls but call the right people and still perform as well, and so on.

When I learned to let go of control, that's when things turned around.

To conclude this episode, I would like to bring about what are some implications for leaders here, and to start off I'd like to bring your attention to a Trinity Solutions survey, where a staggering 79% of people said they had experienced micromanagement in the workplace, and 69% even said they were considering leaving their job because of it.

What's more, 85% of people stated micromanagement was negatively impacting their morale — a statistic that every aspiring leader should take to heart. And if you're one of these leaders, or you're suffering while working for a micromanaging boss, remember this: micromanagement usually doesn't stem from bad intentions. What does it stem from?

From lack of ability to take on your responsibility. Again, my final message here is that we should learn to go outside of the enlightened path, using the Nasrudin analogy, where we feel in control, and explore and make decisions where there's less light, but where the keys to transform our business are - and since we have no control over there, we have to learn to take on responsibility, even for what we can't control. Or maybe I should say, even more for what we can't control??

I'd like you to think about this as an assignment during this week.