Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina famously begins, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
But every toxic company culture isn’t toxic in its own way. Every type of terrible company culture can be traced to just a handful of fundamental errors, apparently.
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Question of the Month
By Wendy Lambourne, Director, Legitimate Leadership.
Question: Is it ever appropriate to remove decision-making authority or to take back control?
Answer: In the Legitimate Leadership framework, empowerment requires a leader to go beyond asking people for their opinions, listening to them, and only then deciding. Empowerment means letting people decide and living with their decisions even if they are contrary to the decisions that the leader would have made.
The degree to which a person is empowered therefore simply equates to the number and types of decisions that the person is now making, independently of their boss, which they weren’t making previously. Conversely, the degree to which a person is being disempowered can be gauged from the number and type of decisions that the person was taking but which have subsequently been taken away from them.
On the assumption that empowerment is “good” and disempowerment is “bad”, it is useful to consider whether it is ever appropriate to remove decision-making authority because to do so is seemingly disempowering.
At Legitimate Leadership, we believe that taking away or reducing people’s decision-making authority is generally not a good move. However there are a few instances where it should be done. We believe it is not good for the following reasons: Read the full answer by clicking here.
By Wendy Lambourne, Director, Legitimate Leadership.
Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
Put another way, when things don’t change, they atrophy or ultimately cease to exist.
Yet management has largely remained unchanged for the past 100 years.
Certainly, what managers believe they are here to do and for what purpose has remained largely unaltered for a century. Ask them (as we at Legitimate Leadership have done across the world for the past 25 years), “What are you here to do and for what purpose?” and the consistent response is, “I am here to get results out of people.”
Managers believe this for two reasons.
Firstly, people in a management role are generally not doing the work themselves – most of what is done is done by others. Secondly, most managers are measured and rewarded based on the results that they get out of people.
The problem with the results-focused conception is that it puts managers into a position where they are experienced by the people they lead as being there to ‘take’ from them. This in turn produces resistance and induces conflict into the relationship. Employees feel they are being coerced or forced when ‘the stick’ is used to get results out of them, and they resist. When ‘the carrot’ is used they feel manipulated, and their instinctive response is to manipulate back.
Legitimate Leadership turns this entire notion on its head.
Article: Adam Grant – Beware The 4Rs Of Toxic Work Culture
By Jessica Stillman, Contributor, Inc.Com magazine.
COMMENT BY WENDY LAMBOURNE, LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP, ON THIS ARTICLE: I find Adam Grant’s mental map extremely helpful. The Relationship-Results continuum speaks to the criterion of Care. In Legitimate Leadership terms, though Care is about tough love, it is acting in the employees’ best interests (which are to be the best human beings that they can be). The Rules-Risk continuum relates to the criterion of Growth or Empowerment.
What Legitimate Leadership believes about controls in an organisation is as follows:
1. Both the retention of control to perpetuity and the instantaneous removal of all control are disenabling.
2. There is a place for control in a legitimate relationship of power as long as it is subordinate to the intention to empower.
3. Freedom without rules or constraints is anarchy. Rules and constraints without freedom is totalitarianism. Empowerment is freedom within constraints.
4. The level of control which is exercised in any legitimate relationship of power must be commensurate with the task and personal maturity of the person being empowered.
SUMMARY OF THIS ARTICLE: Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina famously begins, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
But every toxic company culture isn’t toxic in its own way. Every type of terrible company culture can be traced to just a handful of fundamental errors, apparently.
A “toxic” culture isn’t just one you subjectively don’t like.
On his WorkLife podcast recently, Wharton professor and best-selling author Adam Grant said a toxic company culture is always about a lack of balance. Companies become toxic when they go way too far toward one side on a couple of scales of competing values: relationships versus results and rules versus risk.
