Poor Leadership and the Art of Delegation

So we have designed courses on Leadership Skills, replete with matrices, measures and seven steps to good, no wait, great leadership. And many hair brains are making millions teaching the skills of leadership. What Leadership Skills were learnt by Michael Dell, Richard Branson and John F. Kennedy (these being my favorites) that enabled them to lead and author the legacy of success they did. As it turns out, very little was taught to them at a formalized gathering of the insecure  and leadership aspirants. These great people had some basic characteristics of leadership in common, of which the most critical to my mind are passion, the ability to inspire passion and last but not the least, they knew how to delegate authority as against delegation of footwork. 

That brings me to one of the worst traits of poor leadership – mindless delegation of work as against the requisite skill and willingness of delegation of authority. Having been witness to many poor leaders and a few truly inspiring ones, I believe that the key to definitive leadership is to be able to successfully delegate work, responsibility and goals while maintaining alignment with the end state.

TRANFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP Vs. TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIP

While researching for this article, I was introduced to the theory of Transformational Leadership formulated by James MacGregor Burns. Transformational leadership is defined as a leadership approach that creates valuable and positive change in the followers with the end goal of developing followers into leaders – a concept of co-motivational leadership in which "leaders and followers help each other to advance to a higher level of morale and motivation".

According to Bernard M. Bass, who later developed on Burns’ theory says that there are four key characteristics to Transformational Leadership.

 

 

• Idealized influence describes managers who are exemplary role models for associates. Managers with idealized influence can be trusted and respected by associates to make good decisions for the organization.

• Inspirational motivation describes managers who motivate associates to commit to the vision of the organization. Managers with inspirational motivation encourage team spirit to reach goals of increased revenue and market growth for the organization.

• Intellectual Stimulation describes managers who encourage innovation and creativity through challenging the normal beliefs or views of a group. Managers with intellectual stimulation promote critical thinking and problem solving to make the organization better.

• Individual consideration describes managers who act as coaches and advisors to the associates. Managers with individual consideration encourage associates to reach goals that help both the associates and the organization.

One of the main reasons that this theory attracts attention is because of how it defines all the characteristics exhibited by poor leadership (or alternative legacy leadership) a.k.a Transactional Leadership which is characterized by the following dynamics.

• Leadership is responsive and its basic orientation is dealing with present issues
• Leaders rely on standard forms of inducement, reward, punishment and sanction to control followers
• Leaders motivate followers by setting goals and promising rewards for desired performance
• Leadership depends on the leader’s power to reinforce subordinates for their successful completion of the bargain.

In a world that was designed along the factory line of input - (rule based) processing – output, transactional leadership made for a successful recipe since progress and profitability was defined by perfection and success measured on a per unit basis.

In the modern business environment that is actually driven by lateral coordination across cross functional teams, every link in the value chain contributes to the strength of the output and the output itself is more a continuum than discrete transactions, transactional leadership in silos of input-process-output has proved to fail.

THE  THREE KEY ELEMENTS OF DELEGATING IN A TRANSFORMATIONAL culture is to entrust responsibility and authority to others and to create accountability. These four key elements are not independent elements but must be compounded together to achieve right delegation.

RESPONSIBILITY: The defined work, job or task that is delegated. What characterizes a poor leader is the inability to accurately define the responsibility in objective terms. In the minds of what characterizes a poor leader the concept of delegation of responsibility is much akin to outsourcing the work while owning the results, all without well defined parameters for success.  The responsibility is always a moving target without a benchmark or boundaries.

Poorly Defined Responsibility - “Please respond on XYZ’s request for quote to get a competitive quote”

Well Defined Responsibility - “The following RFQ has come from XYZ and we need a quote that includes a competitive pricing in the range of $aa to $ ab per unit while ensuring a minimum x% margin for us and due consideration for the following constraints that are stated by XYZ…..”

AUTHORITY: The quantum of decision making empowerment. A poor leader is insecure about delegating authority and therefore, as mentioned before, ends up delegating the work and not delegating any empowerment to make pertinent decisions. In most companies where the control systems are designed towards transactional leadership, the systemic architecture is such that decision making is a parliamentary process with everyone contributing and one person working. Retained authority is most often confused with feedback, the two being very separate concepts.

Retained Authority - “Please design a model around the XYZ formulae”

Feedback - “The XYZ formulae is one of the options along with ABC and UVW formulae. Compared the XYZ presents the following advantages in the given scenario while ABC presents some key benefits….. Please compare the 3 models within the constraints making reasonable assumptions and let’s take a call on which works best.” 

ACCOUNTABILITY: The ownership of results, success or failure. This is the most important aspect of successful leadership and most often the most lacking of qualities of poor leaders. Most organizations operating in a top down management style fail to break down strategies to units of work that can get defined in concrete and goal aligned objectively measurable outputs. Put simply, if you do not know how success is defined you cannot entrust accountability for success.

As we see this is very closely linked with how well the responsibility is defined and the successful delegation of decision making authority. A well defined responsibility with appropriate ability make necessary decisions define the boundaries of success. A poor leader generally will define what they need and how he needs it done with little or no accountability of the results. The team ends up doing the ‘dirty work’ (make the excel sheet and the presentation) with the leadership being solely accountable resulting in credit for success and blame for failure.

This will generally lead to a lack of ownership and extreme transactional attitude towards the responsibility. The box is defined and just needs to be painted red.

POOR LEADERSHIP & POOR DELEGATION

The matrix below demonstrates how poor leadership differs from good leadership in terms of leader – follower relationship.

Master & Slaves: The worst form of leadership and unfortunately still seen in many places, especially in manufacturing based organizations. This form of relationship is characterized by lack of flexibility, motivation and innovation. The ‘box’ is almost a prison and the responsibility is more a mindless workflow with no intellectual application. The ‘box’ is seldom defined in objective terms and no one is encouraged to learn more about the box than painting, shaping or assembling as required of the slave. 

Designer & Labor: In this form of leader – follower relationship the leader is the master craftsman with his followers acting more as apprentices. So, although the apprentice gradually learns the art and craft, there is no encouragement to think outside the defined ‘box’. The ‘box’ is seldom defined in terms of expected results and the shape, size and color is ruled by the craftsman.  

Manager & Reportee: This is really where the evolution of good leadership starts with authority and accountability being delegated downwards. The ‘box’ starts to make more sense and the individual parts get thought about and assembled, painted and shaped differently with innovation gradually creep in. This model still has the drawback of maintaining functional silos and hence even though the followers are more empowered, there are constraints on breaking the ‘box’. The shaper becomes a master shaper and the painter becomes a master painter over time but no one becomes the master box maker.

Leader & Collaborative Team: This really is the desired utopia where the team is inspired by the manager to act and work on assigned tasks while being aligned to the organizational goal, own responsibility of decisions and associated outcomes and experience behavioral unity with the leadership. This also allows for individuals within the team to bring in cross functional thought leadership encouraging true out of the ‘box’ approach to tasks.

SO, WHAT MAKES FOR GOOD DELEGATION?

E.M. Kelly said, “The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, ‘Go!’ - a leader says, ‘Let’s go!’” Successful delegation is “the act of empowering one to act for another…”, empowerment being the key. All managers delegate but a poor leader will delegate work as against a good leader who delegates to empower and develop human resources.

What’s missing in a poor leader is the ability to

• Provide direction and feedback
• Ability to inspire goal congruence
• Eagerness to create succession through delegating not only responsibility but authority & accountability – dumping work as against delegating
• Avoiding resource stagnation through cross functional diversity in delegation

Here is one for all poor leaders….!!