Finding the fulcrum for balancing control and freedom | Managing Leadership

A bit of slack

Whether you keep your juniors on a short leash, or give them plenty of rope to hang themselves with, it’s worth remembering that you’re still left holding the other end. Ultimately, the CSI team is going to find you there. What have you been doing at your end of things?

If you maintain tight control, then you may simply be using your juniors as closely monitored extensions of yourself, or as a sort of sustenance for your greatness; hewers of wood and haulers of water for the larger enterprise, the one and only master architect of which is you. Their shortcomings – which, as a micromanager, you are likely to be inclined to find – will only fuel your abiding sense of superiority – your need to be acknowledged as the only competent person in the building.

But if you give them free reign combined with little guidance, you may really be exposing just as pronounced and dysfunctional a neediness. If they fail, hang themselves as it were, it may really turn out to be just a callously staged call for help on your part.

Either way, you will be found out. Because the other end of that leash, that rope, was yours. You were ultimately responsible for the project, regardless of who was working on it with what degree of your control.

So, when you delegate, it’s worth bearing in mind not merely the two points at either end of the delegation – you and the delegatee – but the line of authority/responsibility itself. Remember that it is only authority that you can extend to your junior; responsibility – all of it – remains with you.

Now, add the anxiety which that thought produces together with the common need to be needed felt by so many of us, certainly including most of us who are managers, and you’ve got the makings of these unsavory metaphors. The problem is that they arise in us, are about us, and moreover are about our insecurities and how we project them onto, or express them in our treatment of, others.

The problem is that we struggle to reverse the natural order of things: we attempt to make our employees responsible without giving them any meaningful authority at all. At the same time, we sense the inherent contradictions in our imagining that we can delegate the undelegatable. So, we try to resolve those contradictions by either keeping the inappropriately delegated responsibility under suffocatingly close supervision, or by attempting to abrogate it altogether.

But neither will work. If we bear in mind that we are paying out line, one end of which is authority which we award to our delegatee, and the other of which is responsibility, which we retain, we can view the line of contact between us more effectively. We can pay it in or out as appropriate – according to the information that resonates back and forth along it with the unfolding of events – until we have brought the project safely on board (and accomplished some excellent training into the bargain).

But that surfaces a new metaphor for another time. For now, just try to cut yourself a little more slack. Come to a closer understanding of what elements of your taskings you can delegate, and which you can’t. You’ll find the delegation proceeding more smoothly – and with less anxiety – for both of you.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of bearing in mind not just what we are doing, but the physical and conceptual vehicles by means of which we do it, please see this thoughtful piece, by Michael Wade of Execupundit.com, about maintaining the information-communicating resonance of the meeting room.

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