Will It Hold: Stop Developing Leaders Start Removing Dependency - LinkedIn Live
Steve Lowisz argues that leadership development programs miss the real problem: leaders create dependency by making teams defer decisions and seek approval. He outlines a framework to break the cycle, including defining clear outcomes, assigning decision ownership, and replacing approval processes with guardrails.
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We need to stop developing leaders and we need to start removing the dependency that we've created in leaders. That may not be a popular way to start this LinkedIn Live, but if you're joining, this is a topic that we have got to drill in on because the leadership development industry is taking advantage of the problem that I just described. We need to stop developing leaders and we need to start removing the dependencies that we've created in our organizations. Let me give you an example of what I mean, and we'll dig into this a little bit and look at all the contradictions that we create in our organizations. And then we try to solve for those contradictions with leadership development and training. And I am not saying or suggesting that training doesn't have its place. Leadership development has its place. But let me give you an example. About a month ago, I got a call from a community bank CEO, not in the state of Michigan, and he had heard about some of the work we do in community banking and asked that I come in and I spend some time with his leadership team and provide some training for his executive team in the next layer under. So think of COO, CFO, and then that next layer under. Head of retail, head of commercial, head of treasury, so on and so forth. And I started to ask them a lot of questions because it's really easy to say, sure, I'll come in and I'll train them and everything will be great. But how many times have you invested in leadership development? It was a great experience. They took a lot of notes. They learned a lot of things. And if you're watching this, you've probably done the same thing. And then they go back to the office and nothing really changes. And then we say, well, The leadership development wasn't any good, or it's the person in and of themselves. And as I was asking the CEO questions about, help me understand what the challenges are, what's actually going on. I finally ended the conversation as after he answered many of these questions and I said, I'm sorry, I can't help you with leadership training because your team doesn't need leadership training. What they need is less dependence on you. And those are two very different things. It's not that they didn't have the capability or the ability. It's that this particular CEO had created a system, an operation within his bank where it was all about dependence on him. And that had cascaded down throughout the organization. No amount of leadership development was gonna change that. What we needed to do was remove the dependency that he had actually created. And this goes on in every single organization, in my own organization, in every organization that I've ever been in. So let's, we need to dig deeper into this. Why does this happen? And specifically, what's the practical steps to undoing this mess we're in so that we remove dependency? Now I'm gonna make one statement on this. Anybody who's watched any of my social posts or he— I love to point out contradictions because We sweep them under the rug. We solve for the symptom. Well, this person needs a little more leadership and there's dependency. And we continue to do that. We're in this cycle. So I point out the contradictions because I live the same contradictions you do. But the goal is to solve for the root cause. What's really happening and how do we actually address it? You know, in my experience, I think the intent of most leaders, sometimes they know it, sometimes they don't, is to become indispensable, right? To be such a great leader that they're the go-to when there's a problem going on. And I think that's one of the most expensive mistakes that we make in organizations. This CEO, CEO that I was talking about, this bank CEO, prided himself on his 41 years of experience in banking. So he was the natural go-to guy. The guy within the bank that all of the leaders came to. But there's an expense to that. I mean, think about what we do. Take a step back for a second. Take out all of your preconditions of what this session is going to be about and so on. But I want you to think about the experience you've been in. I mean, let's think. We celebrate the leaders that know everything, that jump in and solve all the problems, that are the go-to for everything. We celebrate that. Now, come on. What happens when we celebrate that? And every decision rests on the shoulders of that leader because we celebrate the fact that he or she is capable of solving every one of the problems out there. We unknowingly create this level of dependency. And it— and that's the evidence because you can see the line outside that individual's door of everybody coming in to have them solve the problem. Problem. Either you're a leader like that, or you know a leader like that. And most of us as leaders, as we've come up all the way to CEO, we're either still doing it or we struggle with it to a certain extent. And, and it's the right intent. We want to be the one that helps that person succeed, so we solve the problem for them. We remove all the stumbling blocks from each of our team members because we're told that's what servant leaders do. But all we're doing is continuing to create dependence. And it's the most expensive mistake we can make as leaders in all of our organizations. So let me ask you a question. I want you to ponder this for just a second. No matter what level of leader you are, if you're a supervisor of an hourly group to a supervisor at Taco Bell to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, if you were to leave for 30 days, you go on a sabbatical for 30 days, For many of you, your organization would fall apart. Something would get missed. Decisions wouldn't be made. What, what is that thing that wouldn't continue without you? And you've got to be honest. You can't say, oh, everything's fine. For 30 days, we'll have zero problems. And in some instances, there's probably some truth to that because you've probably have done some of the things I'm going to talk about today. But for the majority of us, If we were to leave for 30 days, there would be some challenges within our organization. And that is evidence of the dependency that I keep talking about. Will accountability go out the window while you're gone for 30 days? Will those customer decisions go out the window for those 30 days? So as a result of that, that's the frame and the context for this conversation today. But I'm going to go after in this conversation one of the, the safest assumptions in leadership. And that's that the answer to everything that I'm describing is more leadership development. Look, I'm in the space. It's not. Leadership development does not solve the dependency problem that I'm talking about. It— education is fantastic. But it doesn't solve the problems. We need to understand the contradiction that's going on, and we need to put some things in place around this contradiction itself. So we like to say as leaders, hey, I'm going to empower my team. I don't have dependency. But I want you to be honest again. I want you to reflect on a couple of things, right? And I see this all the time in organizations. Man, I've seen it in mine. I've created this. At times in my own organization. I'm not proud of it, but I've got to look at it as a data point and say, how did it get created in the first place? Now tell me if some of these resonate with you, right? We say we want to empower people. We want to delegate to them, but all of the important decisions still come back to us. I mean, think about it. Take a step back and really think about it. Independent judgment of your team often gets second-guessed, and it's not through a negative intent. Often it's done through, "Hey, help me understand why you chose that," and so on. But then we start to say why you wouldn't have chosen that, and we start to pull back the dependency or pull in more of the dependency. Mistakes, when they're made— oh yeah, we encourage mistakes, but as soon as they're made, we jump in to solve them as leaders as opposed to walking through the process of recovery and teaching that person the value of recovery. We end up praising the leaders in our organizations that are the quote unquote heroes. I've mentioned this in a previous LinkedIn Live. The ones that work a ton of hours, they wear it like a badge of honor. And we say, oh, you're so awesome. We're showing what we expect. And, you know, think about it. If people are coming to you to buy a 12-cent pencil, again, I've used that in previous LinkedIn Lives. There's a dependency that we've created. I'm not gonna call it micromanagement. I'm not gonna call it authoritarianism or anything along those lines. There's extremes, I completely get it. But I'm talking about the practicality of day to day. We say one thing and we do something else. And what's come to be true, you can study this, is that it's not the leadership development that fails. You bring in a speaker, you bring in a program, Most of them are actually pretty good, but it's the system in reinforcing it or the lack of the system reinforcing what they've been taught that creates the dependency. So they get taught X, but our systems, the way we operate within our organization are something completely different. I mean, I wrote this down. This is so incredibly important to kind of connect with. Information changes what we know. Right? So information is great. Education is great. Leadership development is great. Installation changes what people do. But in order to install, we have to change the system that they're operating within, or it's nothing more than a wish and a prayer that something changes. So we've got to understand this. We've got to focus on this. Here's the question. Think about the last leadership development program you brought in, the last speaker that you've brought in that were good. Don't throw the bad ones out, right? That, that actually were, were good. And if you reflect back on after that session was over, sessions were over, program was over, to what— whatever the case was, did the number of decisions that get escalated up through leadership actually drop? Let me ask that one more time, and I want you to be honest about this. If you're a CEO, you need to think this through right now because it's the right intent, it's the wrong execution that we often have. The last speaker program, the hundreds of thousands of dollars that you invested in your organization and in your people because it's the right thing to do. When you look back on it now, Did it reduce the number of decisions that get escalated up? Did it push the decisions closer to the people that should be making the decisions or vice versa? Unfortunately, statistically, when you look at this, it doesn't do what I just described. The decisions stay at getting escalated up. That is evidence of the contradiction I'm talking about and the dependency that we create with the right intentions. But unfortunately with the wrong outcome. You know, you can train all you want, but a smarter bottleneck is still a bottleneck. Just because you're more intelligent about the bottleneck doesn't mean you reduce the bottleneck. Excuse me, I've got to take— I've got something caught in my throat. So anyways, so what I want to do is, is dig in a little bit deeper on some of this stuff and what does it actually mean And then how do we go about actually changing the dependency? I'm gonna give you a couple of practical things. Part of this is a certain self-evaluation if you're a leader. Which of these things are you actually doing? And really the dependency that I'm talking about is generally not created through compliance or as I mentioned, ill intent. It's actually created through the little moments between a leader and their team member. Or a leader in another leader that reports to them, still being a team member. For example, simplest thing, your team brings you a question that they actually have the capability of answering it, but you answer it for them. Now it seems like such a minor detail, right? That, hey, they came to me for help, I've got to answer it for them. I'm a servant leader, that's what we do, we solve their problems. But I want you to think about that over and over and over. If David, my video photographer who's sitting across from me right now. David, say hi to everybody. Hello. If, if David brings me a problem, and every problem he brings me I solve, but I, and I didn't even think about whether or not he's capable of solving it. David, what's that going to create? Dependency. Complete dependency, where you're going to come to me for everything. That's the thing. And I, and I think I'm being helpful. You as a leader probably think you're being helpful, but in those little moments, we're planting the seed of dependency. Now, there's a time and a place that David doesn't know what to do. Maybe he doesn't have the experience. He's never been through a situation like that. And we've got to provide some guidance and some mentorship. There's a time for that. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the little moments that are repetitive over and over. Somebody on your team misses a deadline. You kind of sweep it under the rug and you fix it for them. Let's say it's something that needs to be done for a client. The leader swoops in, takes care of it, doesn't want a pissed off client. I get it. But what is that actually showing to the individual? If I miss the deadline, my boss is going to solve it for me. Now, there may be consequences to it. There often is not for little things like that. And we continue to inadvertently create dependency. What happens when a customer complains? Do you take over or do you guide the person to actually solve for the problem. Or somebody makes a decision on your team, even my leadership team, they make a decision, it's not what I would do, so I take it back over. I've done this plenty of times over the years. Again, I'm not proud of it, but it's— I think I'm doing the right thing based on my own experience. But let's face it, there's an old saying, there's more than one way to skin a cat. There is more than one way to solve a client problem, to approach a client problem. Just because my way is this doesn't mean their way is wrong, but We don't often think about that. We just naturally want to solve for the problem. Again, right intent, but we start to create the seeds. We plant the seeds and now we're watering them of dependency. And then we get upset when our team can't make their own decisions. And then we say, hey, here's the problem. They need more leadership training. No, they need less dependency on their leader. That's what we— that's the contradiction that we have, that we have to deal with. And I said this in the last live session a week ago. I wrote it down again. It's our human behavior actually follows the path of least resistance. So without even thinking about it, our psyche is going to start following that. And hey, right, they're going to come in and solve for me. I don't really have to worry about it. And then we say they're not taking accountability. No. That's not it in most cases. If you really look at the environment we've created, we've created the dependency that allows them to not have to deliver what they're supposed to deliver because we keep solving it for them. Right intent, we don't want the customer to see it. Wrong execution. You know, alongside of all of this, I want to make this, this concept of winning tied to this, right? Because dependency often is created when we don't have a clear understanding of what winning in a situation actually means. So we inadvertently create this dependency because the goal of what we're trying to achieve continues to change depending on how I woke up this morning. Today the goal is X versus Y. But what we need to understand is we can— we love to use the term empowerment, right? Our, our, one of our core values is to empower our team. Which is great. But if we empower our teams without clarity of what success looks like, all we have is abandonment. Let me say that again. If we talk about and give empowerment to one of our team members, to one of our leaders without clarity. It's really abandonment. And here's the thing, I realized I did that today having a conversation with one of my team members. There was some obvious question about what the goal was, about what the outcome was. I had, I had given carte blanche to this individual to do whatever this individual thought was necessary. I realized in the context of empowerment, and I want you to really think about this if you're a leader right now, and if you're not a leader, think about this anyways because you're going to be in this situation. How many times have you quote unquote empowered somebody and then they didn't do exactly what you thought they should have done, or the outcome wasn't exactly what you thought of, and you blamed that person? Like, if you're honest You've done it and I've done it. And one of the reasons that I did it, and during this conversation I had today, is my job as the leader is to ensure complete clarity. And without it, and that hands-off approach that I particularly, I like, it creates abandonment, the feeling of I'm not supporting that person because I wasn't absolutely clear about what the outcome was, not about the tasks to get there. That's not my job. My job is to be very clear. Your job as a leader is to be very clear about what the outcome is. And if we don't have it, winning doesn't become obvious. Dependency rises. They don't know how to make a decision. They don't know what to make a decision against. And I was in that today. And here's the thing. If people have to guess on your team what winning means, they're going to continue to ask you what they should do. Think about that for a second. If, if they have to continue to guess what winning means, what clarity of winning means, they're not going to be clear on how to make a decision. If they're going to keep coming to you and we're going to answer the questions and we're going to perpetuate this whole idea of dependency. Clarity reduces the need for the dependence on you and for the permission that people have to ask to actually do things. It might be clarity of the goal. It might be clarity of the guardrails around that goal. But without it, they ask for permission. You grant permission. So now you've trained them that they need to come to you for permission. And we have just exacerbated the issue of dependence. I see this in every single organization. I see this in my own organizations. Right intent, incorrect outcome. And again, if you're leading, I want you asking yourself, there is no point in watching any of this at any time unless you're going to take it seriously and ask yourself some questions. Yes, I can come across as a little hard on some of this stuff because I see the impact that it makes in my own companies as well as in the organizations that I do work with. Leadership development doesn't solve this stuff. Removing dependency begins to solve this stuff. Here's what I want you to do. Write this down. I'm gonna give you some homework. Can I see if you actually did it? Absolutely not. But I want to give you some practical things that you should be doing. On Monday morning, or tomorrow, Friday morning, but usually this is on Monday morning, I want you to pick one recurring responsibility that you have, that your team has. And I want you to write the winning outcome, the guardrails to make sure that winning outcome has been done right, who the decision owner is in that particular situation, and what is the evidence that they have to provide back to you. That's the clarity you've got to give somebody on your team. Here's what winning looks like. Here's the guardrails that are around it. You own it, David. I'm using David as an example. And here's the evidence of the outcome that needs to be done. Then back off and give them the autonomy to execute. Don't answer every single question, or at least guide away from that. You can ask them questions back, but don't give them the answer. But this is how you start to undo the dependence that every one of us in leadership, without even realizing have created. Now, again, I use myself as, as an example for almost everything because all of the stuff around Guide, Don't Drive, human performance that, that I put out on social media is not because I'm an expert in leadership. It's because I'm an expert in leadership mistakes. I know exactly what not to do because I've done all of the things that I talk about. Every one of them I have messed up somewhere in the last 30, 2, 4 years of leading or managing. Unfortunately, I always looked at those two things as different. We won't get into that today, but that's, that's for a future topic. They're really one and the same, and it's stupid to separate the two of them. Anyhow, but I had gone, and I think I may have used a similar situation on a previous video, but I was away when a client issue came up, and this isn't too long ago, so this is relevant, this is recent. And again, I see this all the time. My team had all the information I wasn't involved in with the client. I wasn't involved with the project with the client. They had all the facts. They had the day-to-day operational relationship with the client. They actually knew the options we could take to solve for the issue that had come up. They had more than enough experience with the client, with the situation, with what we needed to achieve in that situation. They had all of that. And yet, yet they waited 3 days for me to return to make the call on what they should do. Now, here's the truth that I want you to really contemplate, even for you. They were not incapable. They were trained to wait. I trained them to wait based on the environment and the way in which I created the dependency of second-guessing their decisions in previous times while I was gone that were similar to that. They remember that stuff. This is real. And really what it came down to in that particular situation I had a control problem that was guised or disguised as a quality issue. I wanted it done a certain way. I think they would have probably solved it with a better outcome than even the way I ended up solving that situation, and then learned from that to try not to do that again, right? So we've got to be reflective on this, but this— these are the things that create Dependency. Now, if this is all true— well, actually, let me ask you one more question, and I already kind of referenced it, but it's, it's stuck in the back of my head. I wrote it yesterday. I've got it in front of me, actually, and I've got it in blue to highlight the fact that I want to ask you the question. That's why I have notes in front of me. Otherwise, I might not hit everything that I want. But I want you to think about this: how many people have you called incapable when your behavior trend actually is the thing that trained them to depend on you? Let me ask that again. How many people have you called they're incapable when your actual behavior as their leader trained them to depend on you? If you're honest, it's happened to you, and probably more than once. Now, I'm not saying every leader does this, but the vast majority I don't know what the percentage is. I'm gonna guess it's more than 80, 85% inadvertently create dependence like that. Now, what do we do? If this is true, and it is, the data shows it, you experience it, you've seen it, you've seen it in your leaders, you've seen it in a previous company. I've seen it in mine, I've created mine. So we know that this is true. The evidence is overwhelming, guilty as charged, and we all are to a certain extent. Not going to pass the same judgment on you, right? You decide how much of this is actually relevant on you. So what do we do in situations like this where they're dependent? Well, we say, let's delegate. Let's just— let's delegate this off to our team. Okay, let's, let's think that through in practicality. And what's the difference between delegating tasks and delegating judgment? Because what we're really good at and what we're taught in most leadership training And there's, there's good reason for some of this. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but we stop short. Let's think about this. If I delegate certain tasks to David, again, I'm just using David because David, you're in front of me and there are certain tasks that I delegate to David, do I not? This is true. Okay. So I can delegate tasks to David, whether it was, let's say he does a social media post. He does not. But let's say he does a social media post for me. And so I can delegate that work and it'll free up some of my time. Fair enough. But if I tell David exactly what I want, am I delegating judgment or am I just delegating the work? Let's think about this. If I tell him I want it exactly like this, don't think for yourself, David, just do what I've given. Am I creating dependence? Oh, absolutely. Of course I am. Go ahead. There's no— there's no way around it because now everything falls back to you anytime I need to do a post. So I've, I've perpetuated, I've delegated to you like I've been taught, but I've created even greater dependence on me by not giving you any authority, not even authority, not giving you the ability to exercise your own judgment on stuff. And I know I've done that in times gone by, right? I know that with you and with other people, we all have as leaders. So we have to be careful and just, okay, delegation's going to solve for this dependency thing. It is not. When we start to delegate, we need to delegate judgment and give authority of judgment, not just delegate the work. Yes, I want to delegate a lot of the work, and I do, just because I want to get it off my plate, because I'm not the one who should be doing it. That's a little bit different. But I'm also delegating the judgment to say, do it within these confines. Take it back to winning. Winning means this. So if I went to David and I said, David, Winning means I have a million followers. And here's the guardrails. You can't swear in my posts, no naked pictures on my posts, but take some liberty outside of that and use your best judgment. That's different than saying, go create this exactly like this with this idea. Don't, don't take any liberties in this because I don't want to test it. That's delegating the work, which we're really good at. What we're really bad at is allowing the judgment to go with it. And based on not allowing the judgment to go with it, we naturally inadvertently, I believe, create greater dependency. Think that through. Another quote that I wrote down, if you only support independent judgment, when it matches your judgment, you do not support independence. Let me say it again. The ones that, that have got to resonate, I got to say at least twice. If you only support independent judgment when it matches my judgment— so I let David go, but I only agree— I— it's, it's only good judgment on David's part if I agree with it. Now we have some— as, as the leader, we have, we have a little bit of authority. I get that. I am not taking that away. But if I, if I don't allow any of that, right, if it's not— it's— it becomes— I'm not supporting independence, and I'm creating by default more dependence. When you do that, it can be little tiny things that we do that on, but repeat it over and over and over. We can talk about independence, we can talk about You know, empowerment, all these fancy words that we happen to use. But when we're doing these little things like this, we're creating more dependence. Now, Monday morning, here's what I want you to do. But one of the decisions— and I'm making up Monday morning just because I meet with my team on Monday morning. I'm assuming you're meeting with your team once a week. Look, I hope I sure as hell hope you are. That's something we'll talk about at a later— we won't get into that today, but I've seen those Monday morning meetings that really suck and are pointless, and I've seen really good ones that make people uncomfortable, but they come out better. We're not gonna talk about it today, but we're definitely gonna bring it. But Monday morning in your meeting, for one decision that you are the one who normally makes, you're not allowed to make a decision. That person has to bring through your questions a recommendation with options, the risks associated with it, and evidence of what success actually looks like. Do not take the problem on unless it has those 3 pieces. Now you've got to do this consistently, but massive action is the thing that starts to change behaviors. If you don't take that massive action and, and yes, it might unsettle your team the first couple of times, they won't know what to do with it. I completely get that. I've experienced that myself, but you gotta start somewhere if you want to start creating independence, get rid of the dependence so that when you do bring in leadership, it actually— leadership development, it actually makes a hill of beans different, then you've got to start doing some of this stuff. Next step, and I've mentioned this before as well, if you follow any of my posts, I talk about this all the time. We need to stop rescuing people and we need to start leading the recovery. Process when people bring you problems. Now here's what I know: leaders solve problems for their team, for their peer, for their boss, because they care. Now some just want to look good. I think that's the, the minority. Most leaders care enough about their team, they want to solve the problem, but they also rescue their team from situations because it's faster than teaching the person how to rescue from those organizations, right? I mentioned this earlier. The deadline isn't complete, you finish it. The meeting goes badly with a client, so you as the leader take it back and save that person. Now, there's a time for that. I completely get it. So don't take everything with, oh, you can't ever do that again. I don't deal in absolutes. People don't— are not absolute. I'm not absolute, nor are you. So we need to make sure that that's really clear when I, when I mentioned some of these things. And what happens when we jump in like this is the immediate problem goes away. The longer-term problem gets bigger. The dependency that I talked about gets even bigger when we do these things with the right intention. So solving the problem today is great, but it creates a bigger problem tomorrow that we have to undo. Recovery. Is different. We don't solve the problem. We solve for the problem. So when your team, your peer, somebody brings you a problem, the first thing we should do is understand what's going on. That makes a whole lot of sense, but I'm gonna put it into this context. What was the goal? What was the winning? What was the standard you were trying to hit? Where are we not hitting the standard? That's what I call the drift. This is not failure. Let's get rid of that word. I mentioned that in the last couple of videos. We don't use the term failure around here, nor should you, by the way. We want to use the term recovery. Recovery means knowing exactly what the standard— you have to know, and the person that you're talking to that is bringing you the problem. We have to understand that there was drift and what's the reality and why did that drift actually occur? We have to make sure we restate the standard and all agree this is the standard in which we're going to operate under. We have to determine— reset the expectation of how we're going to achieve that standard. What's the specific steps that person is going to take? That puts the ownership on them. And what is going to be the evidence of success? Same thing that I talked about earlier. But when somebody now brings you a problem, you don't solve for it. You start to ask the questions, what does winning look like in this situation? How have we drifted from that? Why have we drifted from that? What are the steps that you're going to take to get back to that? And how will I know you've taken those steps? Because it could lead to even more drift. That's recovery. We should be doing that every day instead of solving problems, because people drift from the standard with a client internally, what they should be doing, what we do at home. And we need to focus on the fact that we can recover from that stand— or from that drift. But it's standard, drift, restate the standard, determine how we're going to come back to that standard, the specific steps that that person owns. They come up with it, you as the leader do not. And what evidence and when will they be able to provide it? That creates Clarity. Go back to my original comment around what winning actually is. But we're not giving them the clarity. We're helping them think through. They're creating a clear plan for themselves to take. You do that. You do the process of recovery. This is not a difficult conversation. Get that outta your frickin' mind right now. I mentioned this in the last video. If you go right to a difficult conversation, you have failed them as a leader. We need to make recovery natural. People don't want to, in most cases, let down their team, let down their boss, and all that. Recovery allows them to recover back to the standard, to take ownership in the standard, and it creates dependence. The one thing we— or independence— with the one thing we have to remove before we start educating them anymore. You can't educate them on how to do stuff and then create an environment where they can't do it. It makes no sense, but we do it unintentionally all of the time. I've got a ton of examples of it. I, I don't want to— I got it. We're at 11:37, so there's a couple of things that I want to hit. I just want to make sure that I go through a couple more steps that are more practical for you, so I'll save some of the examples. I've already used my own, uh, for the future. Here's the thing. Um, think about it in kind of two categories. We either can give people approval or we can give them guardrails in which to make the decision. Now think about this for a second. In the context of everything that I just talked about, the dependency that we naturally create, often we inadvertently— and I'm going to keep saying this inadvertently and by accident because I don't think most leaders intentionally do this. The outcome is the same whether we do it intentionally or, or unintentionally, but we can either create a situation where somebody screws up. For example, I will use an example, a kind of a loose example. Somebody screws up on your team, they make a mistake, they drift. They didn't fail, but they drift. So what do we often do? And I just did this a week ago. We take the responsibility of making that decision away from them. And now we require ourselves to make the approval. You've done this. You've done it with your kids. You've done it with your team members. You didn't make the right choice. Next time, come to me for approval. That's one option. And I guess depending on the severity, that might be the right option. But what are we training when we do that? We go back to dependence. Now we're trying to protect our organization. So the attend is right. But what if instead we put guardrails around the decision? Okay, that, that was, that was a drift. That wasn't the right decision given this similar circumstance. Now, in the future, make sure that we have A, B, C, and D and then make the decision. Now we've got some guardrails on that, and it's providing some level of independence with a safety net around it, but without taking away the decision-making, still allowing them to use some judgment. But allowing certain parameters around it, not to, not to bottleneck it by any stretch of the imagination, but to provide actually additional clarity of what they need to take into consideration to make that decision. Now you're continuing to train judgment, you're continuing to train ownership and independence. So we want to replace approval processes with guardrails wherever we can. Now, there's exceptions to all of that, right? For example, I give a certain amount of autonomy to some of my team members to spend up to a certain dollar amount. There's a guardrail around it and things that they can spend it on so they don't go to the store and buy a new purse or buy a new pair of shoes or whatever the case is. There's guardrails around what it can be used for. That's much better than saying, Well, for every expense that you have, you got to make sure you call me in advance. Now, it sounds like we're trying to be safe, we're trying to create a process, so on and so forth, but we're creating dependency. We're not allowing people to express their own judgment. Most people need to express their own judgment. Approval does feel safe, like you're, you're, you're protecting your organizations, but guardrails actually build speed. And judgment. So do you want safe, at least it feels safe, and dependency? Or do you want to think through what the guardrails are so that the speed of decision-making, the ability to make the decisions, and the judgment that comes along with that is actually developed? Now we're talking real leadership development through real behaviors that change. We're not just talking more educational information. Because that education, as I said earlier when we started this, doesn't matter if we don't— if we don't have the systems in the environment for it to actually work. Now, one last thing. I'm going to wrap this thing up. We inadvertently praise dependence. Think about this for a second. As leaders, We inadvertently praise dependence, and when we praise dependence, it goes a long way. What's an example? I've used this last, last week as well. Leader is the one that's working 80 hours a week because he or she is making all the decisions, and we say, awesome, you're the best worker we have because you put in so much time, you're working 80 hours. Not realizing at that particular point that the reason they're working 80 hours is that they've created nothing but dependency on their team and they're solving for all the crap that their team doesn't have judgment or now lacks judgment because they've created this environment of dependency inadvertently over and over and over. And they have to be the savior in this particular piece. And then we praise it. And then people see that we've actually praised it and they connect the dots and they see what's praised is the thing that I should do. And we start creating more of that. More of that dependency. So what we should really be reinforcing are things like a transfer of judgment to a team member that reports to somebody. When something like that happens, we've provided them with the goal, we've provided them with the guardrails, and we didn't just delegate the work, we delegated the judgment of how the work should be done. That should be praised. But in order to praise it, you gotta be looking for it and you have to create it as a leader yourself or it doesn't cascade down. Throughout the organization. We've got to stop looking at things as failure and we've got to start using the process of recovery and drift. Identify the drift. Don't hit them for the drift, right? What's the standard? Come back. That's a process we should be doing weekly, if not even daily. We shouldn't wait. If it's happening, we help people come back. We help them recover. We help them use their own judgment in deciding how they're going to recover. And then we have some follow-up to make sure that the recovery actually happened. That creates that accountability through independence, not through compliance. Look, here's, here's the deal, folks. Leadership development. I'm in the industry. I think it's a wonderful industry. It has unfortunately been rendered completely ineffective in most cases because of the fact that we We take all of that knowledge and we put it into an environment that inadvertently created dependence. And none of that is allowed to actually flourish, to take hold, and to change behavior. Stop developing your leaders. Stop paying the money for it. First, start removing dependence. This is just barely scratching the surface of some of the things we do unintentionally and some of the things that we need to be able to do. I'll go into it in more detail and in other live sessions. If this or any of the other topics is something that you feel strongly about and you feel you have a completely different view and an angle on this, please let me know. I'd love to talk to you live on LinkedIn Live. We'll patch you in if you're not here local, that's not a big deal. David's the magic behind all of that. We'll figure out a way to do that. Like, these are topics that we need to talk about in a bigger way instead of trying to solve for the symptom. We gotta get to the contradiction, which creates the root cause. We gotta make the conversation completely uncomfortable because it's the only way behaviors will change. If you wanna seed a topic, if there's something related to these things, you can put it out on social, tag me in it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, it doesn't really matter. You can text me, 734-837-8500. Again, whether you agree or whether you disagree, I value your perspective. Bring it to the table. You may have a viewpoint that educates me and changes my behavior. I will not be dependent on you, but it may create better judgment in me. And that's what I would ask that this does for you. Take this stuff to heart. Ask yourself some of these questions. Change your behavior and you change the behavior of those people on your team. You unlock independence, and now leadership development can get a stronghold. Thanks for watching, whether you're watching it live or whether you're watching it recorded. Appreciate it. Again, this is every week. Next week, next week, 11 o'clock on Thursday the 3rd, is it, David? August 3rd, uh, 5th, something like that. Whatever next Thursday is, Stop calling it patience because you're avoiding the gift of recovery. We're going to go in a lot deeper on what this idea of recovery is. And for— if I've said this before, if you go directly to a difficult conversation, you've done it way too early. 90% of difficult conversations can be avoided through the process of recovery. The problem is we're too patient until patience runs out.. And then we think we have to hold them accountable and have a difficult conversation. That's what's taught for— for— for— I've taught it. It's wrong. It's the wrong process. We'll talk more about that next week. See you guys on next Thursday, 11:00.
