His answer is worth sharing with you:

When I started, I viewed my job as three main areas: vision and strategy of the company, development and recruitment of the team to implement that vision and strategy, and the need to communicate all of the above.

Within about four or five years I realized there was something that many of us do not understand when we take a leadership role: culture. Great companies have very strong and great cultures. A huge part of a leadership role is to drive the culture of the company and to reinforce it.

The other thing that has changed dramatically is [a shift] from command and control to collaboration and teamwork. It sounds easy to do, but it’s hard, because you are trained that way in M.B.A. school, in law school. Around 80 to 90 percent of the job is how we work together toward common goals, which requires a different skill set.

Shaping, reinforcing and modeling a strong, positive, open culture. This is the job of not only the CEO but also, collectively, of the senior leadership team.

Top teams need to include in their strategic discussions (1) what the current culture is, (2) what what they want it to be, and (3) how they are, individually and collectively, drive–or retarding–the organization’s transformation to that desired state.

As regards the team/collaboration piece, a manager’s capacity must include the willingness to let go of control and involve others. Nothing new or surprising but, for many managers, it’s still a tough adjustment to make.

I touched upon this phenomenon in my last post. Here now are four reasons for managers’ tendency to adopt a directive style in these situations. See if you can relate to any of these in yourself and perhaps in other managers where you work.

1. Managers have previously developed the “take action” habit. Most of them are promoted from the ranks of individual contributors where they worked in a technical, professional, administrative or blue collar activity. Here success came from organizing and controlling inanimate “things,” such as reports, data, concepts, materials, and so forth. Their job was to take some kind of action or make some decisions around these items. They come to management having already developed a “default,” action-oriented response to their work.
2. A manager’s key success factor is his or her ability to identify and solve problems. Managers are constantly being presented with urgent issues. When they solve one they feel good, feel like they have added value to the operation. So, it’s not surprising that when an employee brings forward a problem the manager’s default response is either to solve it himself/herself or tell the employee how to solve it.
3. They most likely already know the solution. Managers typically have been around longer than many of their employees and have learned a lot about working effectively. Furthermore, if they came up from the ranks, they understand the front line work from personal experience. Often the solution is a no brainer to them. Without duct tape to cover their mouth, it is hard to keep from blurting out the answer.
4. Managers are busy people. It is simply quicker to give the answer, check it off mentally as another problem solved, and send the employee on his/her way. Any other response, such as coaching the staffer to come up with a good solution, will take more of the manager’s limited time.

If you can see one or more of these forces operating within you, you have reached the first step toward changing your default behavior to one of coaching and getting your employees do the mental heavy lifting around problems they encounter in their work.

More to come about this in my next post.

You can’t “lead” things. You can’t lead inventories, cash flow and costs. You can’t lead information, time structures, processes, facilities and tools. You have to manage them.

Why? Because things don’t have the freedom to choose. Only people do.

So, you lead (empower) people. You manage and control things. The problem is, the organizational legacy we’ve all inherited says you do need to manage and control people.

Now, isn’t this simply the nub of it all?

To start with, it’s in our psychological DNA, as humans, to want to control–manage–our immediate environment. That includes the people with whom we come into contact. Add to this the expectation of companies that managers control their departments. That includes their employees. Add to this that most managers started their careers in a professional, technical or hands-on capacity where it was their job to manage “things” (e.g. deliveries, numbers, data processed, hamburgers flipped).

Our biggest obstacle to being their “best boss ever” is our default need to control our employees–what they do, how they do it, the attitude they bring into the workplace, and their level of job satisfaction. Until we let go of this need and realize that we can’t make them do anything or feel any particular way or be satisfied and keen  we will never ascend to that level of effectiveness that we read about in all those best seller leadership books. For some managers, letting this go becomes a life-long journey and some never succeed in it.

A large focus of our management and leadership programs is teaching participating managers how to engage, challenge and inspire their employees, rather than how to “get” staff to perform and feel positive about their job and the organization.

Are you still clutching on to the need–and responsibility–to control your people? Consider, if you will, gradually relaxing your grip and opening up to a way of leading that really gets results.