Is Leadership Like Dragging a Huge Rock Behind You?

Since a decade or so, it has been a good measure to involve people, ask for their opinion, and get them engaged in most company decisions and initiatives. This is intended to cultivate intrinsic motivation and a more enjoyable workplace. Now, we look back and think: what went wrong?

The employees don't see how their contributions have been considered in the decision making process, coordination efforts are getting bigger and complex, and managers are fighting with inertia and resistance. On top of that, everything seems to be a crisis today and we are involved in daily firefighting. As a result, we fall back to micromanagement, forget about being transparent, and all previous good intentions are thrown out of the window.

It appears that we are schlepping a huge rock behind us. Who feels like this today?

Is there a different, alternative way? Instead of being a truck driver with an ever increasing load, imagine you are a conductor of an orchestra. The load is distributed to the musicians in your ecosystem; you are providing a platform for the group of people to collaborate together on the output and the manage the change in their environment independently. This will create motivation in your team and it will make your job easier. How does that look like?

What are the key ingredients to transform into a director's kind of leader? In my experience, it takes a few, simple steps:

• develop a collective imagination of the future, the big picture; and then work together in the goals to reach that northstar
• facilitate the team-level and individual interpretation of these goals and allow experimentation with these goals and the approach to reach them
• provide a space for the people to where they can continuously learn and strive for mastery
• enable collaboration and coordination between the silos that is based on respect and a win-win attitude

I know it is so easy to fall back to the old way of doing things in times of stress. It is important to practice this leadership style and establish routines. Lasting change will come very soon.

How does it feel to make this switch to an orchestra conductor?