A leader explains why compliance-based management creates defensive employees while coaching conversations build real commitment. The difference: treating your organization like a machine versus treating it like a living person with its own personality and needs.
If you think about the machine paradigm and how it works, the leader sets the goals. The goals are handed to the employees. They didn't choose them. They didn't give the goals. I mean, we play this game of we're going to let you have an input. But really, everybody knows I'm telling you what to do. And I'm going to evaluate you at the end. In our model, we go, here's what we want to have done. Will you engage in that? And yes, we do have that coaching conversation that you said. And get to a real level of commitment. Somebody says, told me recently, oh, the living organization is you're looking for commitment, not compliance. That's a really big difference, right? And then instead of evaluating them at the end, we're inviting them to look at what they've accomplished and what worked and what didn't and what can they learn. So we're helping them grow up. I don't want to sit in judgment, but it's my job. So I'm going to tell you what you have to do and what you did wrong and how you can improve. And that sets up this defensive thing that everybody hates. So shifting the paradigm and thinking of the organization as a person, not just the way you deal with individuals, but the collective. When you think of an organization, a collective of people as a person, and you think about what is their persona, what is their personality, what is their context, why are they behaving collectively the way they are? It makes it so much easier for the leader to be able to navigate through a much more complex world.
From Stuck to Leading, Episode 2 — Meet the 5 Inner Fears Destroying Your Leadership
