This is my reflection after reading the book Turn the Ship Around. It is a brilliant book, which gives a quick insight into leadership, and what motivates us and provides sets of questions to reflect on. It’s also short and captivating!
In the book David Marquet describes the difference between the leader-follower (know-all-tell-all) model of leadership and the leader-leader and the benefits and challenges of switching the former model to the latter.
Leader-follow is fairly typical “I will decide and tell you and you will execute” and leader-leader is about empowering all people to think for themselves, own responsibility, have trust in leadership and build confidence to make their own decisions.
The closest to leader-follower from the military in the business world, in my opinion, is command and control management (C&C). I’m not going to dive into command and control management, but this Forbes article is quite a good representation.
Yes, I’m aware that this will be a one-sided, odd, and biased blog post. Luckily, I don’t have any journalistic standards to adhere to! Nor any English grammar standards…
So, how common is this model? Well, I haven’t done any study and can’t be bothered to ask people, so I will just make all assumptions based on my anecdotal evidence and letting my mind wander. Like a good data scientist, I am!
If you ask people managers if they are C&C managers, they will resolutely say no. It’s not trendy, hip and generally seen as obsolete for service and knowledge-based companies.
If you ask people if they work under a C&C manager, the number will be significantly higher than 0%.
So we have some conflict somewhere. Btw. I’m aware that the following is way too much black and white and devil’s in the detail. But it’s for you to ponder about.
So what could happen?
- People managers are aware of being C&C and hide it, because it’s generally not good practice, but they want to work that way. This is a very cynical view on the issue, but there probably will be few leaders like this. The question is what drives people to prefer this model because it is damn hard to be everywhere and do everything!
- People are unhappy, and under-performing and will blame it on management and one of the easy escape routes is “Management is too controlling and I can’t do my job properly”. Again, very cynical view and this will be a minority of the cases.
These two assume the bad in people, so most likely, those will be less common cases. I do believe a lot of C&C behaviour is an unintended consequence of a general lack of trust towards others, which most people carry and we don’t work with.
C&C carries with it a lack of trust in your people to your people. It radiates it. It tells people that you don’t believe they are capable of making decisions and that their opinion would be wrong. You might not intend this, but it is happening, trust me. Ba dum tss… And no matter how smart you think you are with it, if you are doing it intentionally, people’s gut feeling will pick it up. They might just feel uncertain and not understand why, but sooner or later it will bubble up.
Lack of trust seeps deep into people, it grows, lingers in other parts of work and life and manifests itself in a lot of different ways, which are hard to understand for anyone. And you have to be quite self-aware to be able to start to untangle that mess.
If you radiate this through your behaviour, it is very instinctual for people to not trust you back. We live in a world where trust and lack of trust are mostly reciprocated. You show a lack of trust, you get the same back. You should not expect anything less and if you do, you are a bit of hypocrite.
Opposite to it, unconditional love/trust is probably the best feeling in the world. And the most empowering. This one goes to my cats… Not all the lyrics from the song apply to my cats though…
So why do we do it when the massive majority of us agree that it’s not a good approach?Well, thank you for asking dear Wattson, it’s fairly simple…
Insecurity, impostor syndrome, lack of experience, bias towards our own abilities and general habit of trusting us much more than others. If you think I sit on a high horse here, I will raise my hand to all the above! I’m working on it though and this blog is one of the ways.
Now, questions for you to ponder. Yes, I’m giving you homework, don’t be a crybaby.
- When do you trust people?
- What are things or events which start to erode the trust?
- Are those actually real or just the assumptions you let grow?
- Are you aware of what your triggers are to not trust people? When do you get defensive?
- How have you checked that your assumptions are real and are you sure they are not biased by you already deciding not to trust a person?
- Do you feel that you are too deep to turn back? It’s not rational, but your gut doesn’t let you turn around. I.e. you’ve already invested so much to not trusting a person?
- If you realised it might be just you, how do you turn the ship around? See what I did here…
- “I knew they would make this mistake and they made it. I was right not to trust them.” So you knew they would fail and just watched them fail to be able to punish them? What a leader you are. GET F***ING OVER YOURSELF. Ooooh noo… your precious ego… Mature up.
- Are you a person, who likes to dig themselves into a hole? I know you will say no, but think about this. How often does this happen to you? You get mildly annoyed by someone, then you don’t have any contact with the person for 1-2 weeks, but over that period you get progressively more and more annoyed until you talk to the person again and realise that there wasn’t really need to be annoyed at all, because it was all just genuine misunderstanding?
And understand that trusting people at work is exaggerated by the stakes, which are quite high for a lot of us. “If something goes wrong, I might not be able to find another job. I might not be able to care for my family. I might not be able to pay for rent. I might need to move to a different city for another job away from friends and family. I might not be able to retire.” And it feels like we are putting this into other people’s hands by trusting them. People we’ve never met and we can’t know if they care about us at all.
I had no idea where this blog would go, but hopefully somehow smooth sailing. In the end, believe that what you radiate out, you get back.
We people are not that much different from animals. How quickly will your dog or cat recognise that you are trying to give them some treatment or take them to a vet and not just casualy pet them?
Just above average 