Management consultant William N. Yeomans records these two principles in his book, 1000 Things You Never Learned in Business School (Penguin Books, New York).

1. The Principle of Misdirected Expectations: The less time you spend with your people discussing what you expect them to accomplish, the more chance they will accomplish something.
2. The Principle of Autocratic Inaction:  The more you tell people what to do, the greater chance they will do it at the lowest acceptable level.

See the important parallels and differences between them?  The fundamental point is, you can discuss goals and standards and get people to agree or you can dictate to them.  The underlying human view is, most people do not like the my-way-or-the-highway, top-down direction.

So what leadership strategy incorporates the wisdom of each principle?

Meet with each of your key people to talk about what they should do and how it should be done.  Get their opinions and get agreement about what the task before them really is.

Next, if the task seems daunting or complicated, you might ask each one to write down the goals as they understand them.  Also ask them to set some standards at this point – to spell out how well it will be done.  These steps allow you to see if what they heard is the same as what you heard, without your appearing to have dictated the course of action.

Encourage them to use broad strokes to paint the picture.  Do not insist they they spell out every detail for you, and you should certainly refrain from spelling it out for them too.  Give people ample room to use their own talents and creativity.  Then let them go use them.

One last point:  If you lead people who lead others, help them employ the same principled style with their subordinates.  That way, everybody wins.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.