I’ve been thinking a lot about how to grow my team towards independence. How can I lead in such a way that prevents me from derailing their projects by second guessing their detailed actions? How can I lead in such a way that creates independence from my close guidance to promote an environment of trust towards achieving results?

Yep, I’m very guilty of both.

I can get bogged down in the details if I disagree. I can get bogged down in the details if I think we can do better or if we don’t quite meet expectations. Not sure if anyone’s ever noticed this before?

I’ve also detected a pattern that concerns me. When things don’t meet expectations the response has been to blame it on a lack of communication from me to the leader or the team. The answer to this is more time with me. The answer to this tends to be a greater investment of my time into a particular effort. While this is undoubtedly an accurate assessment in some cases, it cannot be the answer in every instance. This is not scalable. This is not sustainable.

Where this really gets ugly is that I often harp on the subject until I get my way. Sometimes simply based on my position this happens quickly.   Other times it drags out into lingering disagreements that typically get worse before they get better.

I do not have a perfect answer to fix these bad leadership habits. I do however have an interesting thought:

What if I did not make a single decision or give one single directive in a whole day? What if my role was only to give guidance and suggestions, but left the decisions ultimately up to others?

Ahh! That sounds really hard! Some of my arguments would undoubtedly be more convincing than others and maybe a little more persistent based on how passionate I might be about a particular subject.

The scariest part is that it just might work. It would force independence. I may try to get bogged down in details, but since the decision would not be mine the decision maker could just override my counters stating its time to move on.

I ultimately believe that as the leader of the organization I must make the most difficult decisions and those are best made by one person. However it is an interesting behavioral model that would probably benefit us greatly if I could limit my decision making to only those things falling into that category of “most difficult”.