Leadership requires learning how to balance two seemingly opposing priorities: 1) being accountable for an expected team outcome or result, and 2) the need to delegate accountabilities to maximize team efficiency and effectiveness. As a leader, you are ultimately responsible for the results your team produces. That can feel high pressure, especially when those results have tight timelines or high stakes (i.e. the results have a direct impact on your/your team’s credibility with the larger organization or other stakeholders). To put it bluntly – when your neck is on the line, the instinct is often to do everything you can to control the outcome.
Most people elevate to leadership positions because of their past performance or their expertise. They were excellent “doers” and demonstrated a reliability for producing expected outcomes (and beyond). We assume that if great “doers” become leaders of others, it will amplify the value they’ve provided. If only it were that simple.
Shifting from “doing” to “leading” is all about sponsoring the performance and coordinated action of others. If done well, leadership enables a team of individuals to collaborate effectively in service of strategic goals. Under pressure, however, many leaders instinctually try to control team outcomes by micromanaging the “doing” of others (or by just doing it themselves). In other words, the only person they trust to meet their expectations is themselves.
Leaders who tend to gravitate towards control under pressure unintentionally end up stifling the contribution and growth of others. While it may drive short term results, it compromises team performance in the long run and increases team dependence on their leader’s time, energy, and attention. Over time, it likely puts more pressure on the leader than necessary, pulling them away from other responsibilities like strategic thinking and cross-organizational coordination. On a personal level, it can also contribute to chronic stress and, eventually, burnout.
The move to control makes perfect sense in the face of high-stakes and uncertainty. Human beings don’t like uncertainty – it’s uncomfortable and can feel threatening enough to trigger our survival instincts. We cling to the things we believe we can count on, and if we can only count on our own judgment, standards, and follow through, it’s hard not to step in and take over.
There are times when hands-on, highly directive leadership is called for. To navigate highly unstable and chaotic circumstances, teams need a high level of clarity and focus to keep moving forward. The problem, though, is many leaders over-estimate how often that approach is needed. Great leadership means knowing what it’s time for now. That requires an ability to zoom out and track the enabling conditions and coming challenges affecting your team’s ability to perform, which you can’t do if you’re always in the weeds.
Delegation, while a leadership imperative, can feel like it’s in tension with the ability to produce reliable results. It’s a skill nearly every leader we meet needs to work on, from first-time managers all the way up to the C-Suite. It’s a never-ending learning opportunity, but the sooner you start practicing, the better off you’ll be for the rest of your career.
At the heart of delegation is connection and entrustment. Trust, of course, is a tricky thing. You actually can’t build trust without practicing entrustment. Said another way, you have to choose to trust others in order for them to become trustworthy.
If you struggle to delegate and allow others to execute, you are likely suffering from a trust deficit. This can come from either:
- Past experience with that individual/group of individuals that gives you reason to believe they can’t be trusted, or
- An unexamined fear that they can’t be trusted (for which there is no evidence). This could include individuals new to the team or organization, or someone taking on responsibilities and challenges you haven’t seen them engage with before. Without proof they’re reliable, entrustment can feel higher risk.
There are three elements of trust every leader should be monitoring:
- Capability
- Character
- Communication
Pick a relationship where you feel trust is in question. As a leader, maybe this is someone on your team you don’t yet trust to follow through on expectations. Maybe it’s the person you tend to micromanage, or you worry about their performance the most. After bringing this person to mind, reflect on the following questions: What are my expectations of this person? What do I expect them to do? How do I expect them to behave?
Next, walk through the following questions for each of the three elements, answering “Yes”, “No”, or “Somewhat”:
Capability:
- Do I and others trust this person’s skills and experience?
- Do I trust them to ask questions and involve others appropriately when their own capability is insufficient?
- Do they quickly communicate breakdowns in their ability to deliver on their commitments?
Character:
- Does this person follow through on commitments?
- Are they honest and accurate about results?
- Do they address poor performance quickly, accurately, and effectively?
Communication:
- Do I trust this person to listen and learn from my and others’ perspective, rather than listening to confirm their own?
- In important matters, do I trust their judgment?
- Do they make commitments that are clear with specific promises and requests?
If in any category you see “No” or “Somewhat”, that’s a place to go to work. If Capability is where trust is lowest, it’s time for a performance conversation. Does this person understand what they are expected to contribute? How would they explain their performance, and what support do they feel they need to improve? If there is an instance in the past where they didn’t meet expectations, what circumstances might have made that commitment hard to follow through on? You can find additional guidance on how to have performance conversations here.
If Character is where trust is lowest, it’s time for a conversation about expectations around company values and behaviors. Are they aware that their behavior has others questioning their commitment to values? What explanations do they have for occasions when they didn’t trust you or others with the truth about results? If they’ve been resistant to feedback in the past, what is it they feel others don’t understand about them or their circumstances? We recommend approaching this conversation with a focus on Accurate listening, which you can learn more about here.
If Communication is where trust is lowest, first ask yourself: have I been clear with this person about my expectations? Have I said them out loud, or are they things I assume they should know without having to be explicit? While we tend to blame capability or character for trust breakdowns, most are actually due to flaws in our communication. Communication is a two-way street, but as a leader, you set the context and conditions for that communication. To improve communication and set people up to successfully meet your expectations, we recommend using our Conversations for Action framework.
There’s no question that it’s difficult to trust others with important things when you can’t be certain they will meet your expectations. Learning to trust your team is much like sending them off down a rickety rope bridge (an analogy I often borrow from Brené Brown, which she references with regard to the challenges of parenting on her podcast). Picture a rickety rope bridge with questionable wooden boards hovering over a dangerously deep ravine. Entrusting your team to take self-supervising action (meaning you’re not hovering or micromanaging) is like sending them off to cross the bridge on their own. Your role as a leader is to give them the handrails – the specific expectations, direction, and boundaries to work with and within, and the routines of feedback and adjustment you set up ahead of time. Then it’s their job to find their way across.
This analogy makes space for the two ways leaders often respond to this challenge: Hand hold to the point no one is growing, you’re overwhelmed, and you can’t fulfill any of your other leadership accountabilities, or put on blinders, take a hands-off approach and hope for the best.
As Brené puts it, if you don’t give them any guardrails they’ll either “recklessly and with abandon charge across it, and often to their own demise”, OR they freeze, “kind of army crawl across it slowly”, or depend fully on you to get them to the other side. Given neither scenario tends to work out well, leaders often swing between these two extremes. Neither is an effective strategy, and both sound stressful and unnecessary.
In highly unstable and chaotic circumstances, it’s the leader’s job to step in and create sufficient stability for the team to keep moving forward. A storm may roll in, strip the guardrails, and whip that bridge all over the place. That’s when your team truly needs your presence and close guidance. Once the storm passes though, give the bridge back to them.
Another hard truth of leadership: Sometimes your team will fail. It will feel like your failure as a leader, and it may feel like proof they can’t be trusted. Failure, however, is a great teacher. It’s the most challenging, often most disappointing, experiences that have us wake up to what we need to do differently. Let recovery from failure be its own challenge for the team to tackle together. If seeds of mistrust seem like they’re forming in the wake of disappointment, have a conversation. Focus on what valuable lessons there are to take away, and guide the team in translating those learnings into new action. Trust isn’t just built in the best of times and in the absence of disappointments. Trust grows exponentially when we see how people recover from disappointment. These are precious opportunities for exponential growth, learning, and strengthening of relationships in the process.
Great leadership isn’t about controlling the behavior and performance of others. It’s about knowing what it’s time for. You make the call – is this set of accountabilities an opportunity for your team to stretch, and for you to practice entrustment? If so, leadership means giving sufficient clarity for them to go off and explore how to fulfill the charge, growing competence and capability as they go. Pretty soon they’ll be building the next bridge all on their own.
