Don't waste your time, by wasting your team

School project needs two 2-liter bottles. Dad solution: buy two of cheapest you can, empty them in the sink, ready to go. Child’s solution: ‘Can I try and sell it?’. One hour later, revenues exceed cost by seven times. Sometimes the ‘boss’ is missing big opportunities that he/she needs to make sure they have built a culture that lets the team execute as they step aside.

Steve Jobs is credited as saying “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”  Stop and think about how much sense that makes. How much money is a company wasting or missing out on when it doesn’t operate by this concept?

So why do we see so many leaders still operating under “if it wasn’t what I told you to do it must be wrong, so just do what I tell you to do.”? From a recent article by Mary Lee Gannon (linked at the bottom) you might summarize it as the same type stuff that comes with leaders lacking executive presence.

My experience leads me to think it’s a couple of things and when it continues to happen it leads to some very bad things for an organization.

First, why it happens:

  1. Leaders thinking/fearing they are the only ones capable of making big decisions. Hence, it allows thinking like the recruiting team isn’t bring the best people forward, hiring committee is bringing the wrong final candidates to leaders to interview and the folks helping with final interviews aren’t as much help as needed
  2. Leaders thinking they were the “smartest hire ever”, so even the next smartest hire needs so much coaching from them that they over-coach and micromanage

Now, and really much more important than the ‘why’, the dangers because this kind of know-it-all leadership continues to happen:

  1. Leaders will lose their best people first. Nothing tells smart people “it’s time to look for a new job” like always telling smart people what to do.
  2. Start the death spiral: high performers leaving, lower performs remaining, leaders rule over as the clear (at least in their minds) smartest in the room, no new ideas come in and the end draws closer.
  3. People that want to try and push for changes and challenge with new ideas see smart people leave, lower performers retreat under leadership pressure and are left in an awkward no man’s land.
  4. There is an increasing paralyzation of decision making. Eventually, every little decision will end up getting bottlenecked and placed at the feet or in the ever-growing queue for this type of leader to weigh in on, and hence, the company can come to a near complete stop of progress.
  5. Proper strategic prioritization will be nonexistent. When all decisions require the leader to weigh-in, that means all requests from the said leader are of equal weight and death spiral number two starts, where an organization then spends all its time on whatever the current request is and it very quickly becomes the chasing of one’s own tail and no strategic focus.

Mr. Jobs had it right, hire the right smart people and work as a team.

https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/how-to-know-if-you-have-executive-presence