Your job as a leader is to build a team so excellent that they no longer need you. And here's the paradox of trying to work yourself out of a job: the better you are at it, the less likely you'll ever be without work.
Sufficiently decentralized leadership looks like a resilient team. No single person is so important that work stops when they go on vacation, take a sick day, or leave for another company. It looks like an empowered, autonomous, aligned, and generally happy team. More on those terms in a bit.
This concept doesn't mean there is no leader. Products and projects designed or run by committees don't get far and certainly don't get there fast. Someone needs to make the hard decisions. However, that person should prioritize teaching others to make decisions as well as they do.
It's rare to find a team with sufficiently decentralized leadership. Often, leaders are either:
Keeping the Lights On: they manage the operations and keep everything moving forward, often through a lot of work. Their team struggles to deliver value because leadership is distracted and reactive.
Power Hungry: they're building fiefdoms to reward those who please them and punish those who do not. They take on the work that most interests them or brings the most prestige and often over-work their teams to achieve their professional and personal goals.
The first is well-intentioned but could be better for their team or company. The second is sadly sociopathic.
Let's talk about what a team looks like that is led by someone whose priority is their people.
If your team members can decide independently about how to execute their work or what the proper work is, they're empowered.
People won't feel empowered if they're being told they aren't allowed to make decisions or if they get in trouble for making decisions. If they're making the wrong decisions, that's not necessarily their fault; it may mean that the leader needs to do a better job of creating and communicating a vision and strategy.
If your team members can work without direction or with minimal direction, especially for long periods, then they're autonomous.
Autonomy and agency in our work are important because they are highly correlated to happiness and satisfaction. This is why lawyers rank as some of the least happy professionals: the restrictions of the law limit autonomy, so beyond the influence of partners and managing directors, lawyers lack autonomy by virtue of the system within which they work.
People won't feel like they have autonomy if they are constantly being micro-managed and told what they should be doing or if they have to constantly report on what they're doing. It's important to have frequent feedback loops, but you have to strike a balance so that people feel supported without feeling like you're hovering.
If your team members understand your organization's vision and mission and how they contribute to achieving the mission, and if they care about it, then you can achieve alignment.
There's a part of this that you can't easily manufacture after the fact and need to get right as part of your recruitment and hiring process; if your team members don't care about the value the team needs to deliver, then you're never going to have a high-functioning team. But you can accomplish anything if you have a team of people who care.
People will only be aligned if the vision, mission, and strategy are clear. Many companies and leaders need to improve at developing vision, mission, and strategy, which is particularly challenging because these must be top-down. If you're a middle manager, you can create a vision, mission, and strategy for your team, which will help them be more effective than if they lacked it. Still, they will be limited and probably even more frustrated.
"We may not be right, but at least we are clear."
-Kevin Systrom
Even if a vision and mission isn't necessarily "good" or one you particularly agree with, if it's clear and your team can align to it, you'll be in better shape than if it didn't exist. Jim Collins's research in Great By Choice demonstrates that having a clear vision and a set of values and sticking to them with discipline was far more critical than what the vision and values were. Aligned and disciplined teams succeeded, and teams that weren't failed.
My research found that managers can't make employees happy, but they can make them unhappy. So, part of our job is to limit our negative impact on our team members.
But people are generally happier if they do work they're proud of and feel good about. And there's loads of research demonstrating that the greater someone's sense of empowerment, autonomy, and alignment with a community, the happier they will be.
People are unhappy when these elements are missing. But when you can provide them all, it's magic. And the happier people are, the more productive they are.
More importantly, though, it's the right thing to do. We owe it to each other to lift one another up. Be a better leader, and you make the world a better place.
Remember that you are loved and worthy of love. Now, go help your team remember that, too.
