Surprising Success of Hands-On Leaders

All my adult life I’ve been taught, and I’ve taught others, that you need to delegate to be successful. That your ceiling is capped by how good a job you do at hiring and letting people smarter than you run with things. I’ve written about how you should adapt your hiring strategies, even.

I’m going to suggest that the best leaders are actually hands-on, but in a specific way.

Passing the Baton

Let me first illustrate how difficult delegation is, though. Think of the process of delegation as a relay race: for projects to move forward, someone has to release the baton…and someone needs to take the baton. As a slightly headstrong leader set in your ways, you finally get to the point where frustration has you reconsidering how deeply involved you are and it’s time to hire someone. You give up the baton…and that new person drops it. This becomes, sadly, a self-fulfilling prophecy. “See? I told you I can’t safely pull that far out of the details! It’s my name on the line and clients have come to expect certain things from us.”

When that baton falls, it could be that you held on too long, or it could be that the next runner fumbled the transfer.

Or as we’ll find next, it could be that you shouldn’t be holding the baton at all, but you should definitely be studying the process of handing the baton off.

Another Way

Here’s the bottom line. I don’t think you should be deeply involved all the time. Nor should you be uninvolved. Instead, you should be deeply involved in the details, build that into a process, and then move on, leaving the implementation to capable people.

There was a really fascinating article in the HBR, recently: “The Surprising Success of Hands-On Leaders,” by Scott Cook and Nitin Nohria. Here are two short quotes:

“When we study some of the world’s top-performing firms, we see a contradictory set of behaviors. These are companies where the CEOs and senior leaders care deeply about the ‘how’—that is, how people do their work—spending significant amounts of time observing the way middle managers and frontline employees work and designing systems and modeling behaviors that guide the methods people use to perform their tasks.”

Note the two things: designing systems and modeling behavior. Then this:

“What distinguishes the leaders of these high-performing firms is their sustained and close attention to behaviors and systems. They are not inserting themselves into every decision or displacing their teams. Instead, they act as teachers and system builders: They’re present in the work not to control it or make every decision themselves but to model standards, sharpen problem-solving, and establish behavioral norms that enable others to act with autonomy and discipline.”

Note that this is a far cry from being a control freak, all the while insisting that nobody can be trusted to do things as well as you do them. (By the way, that’s a memory problem on your part.)

I really love this, and I hope you’ll be involved, but in the right way.

A Quick Illustration

What you don’t want to do is to build your identity around being essential to any ongoing process (that “ongoing” word is important), and I can illustrate where I see this going wrong.

Sandy is ready for an overdue vacation. Things have been tough, lots of hours, a cancelled vacation, and fires to put out because an account person isn’t carrying their weight. 

But the flight is 48 hours away and she can start breathing easier already. She wants to protect her time while in Europe, and so she puts everything in writing so that people have all the information they need.

Things at the shop go great while she’s gone. She jokes that maybe she should leave more often since things went so well!

She dives back in, and putting all that detail in writing goes by the wayside. “There’s no time for that,” is the convenient lie. The underlying truth is that Sandy needs to be involved because that’s where she has developed a deeply learned significance.

Why does she put everything in writing before she leaves? So she isn’t essential. Why does she drop the practice when she returns? Because she needs to be essential (otherwise known as significant).

So the truth is in between. Be deeply involved to understand and develop the processes—together with other qualified hires who might be teaching you something—but then back out and move on to the next area that needs you.

As Shane Parrish said recently, “It’s rare that I meet an exceptional person who is not deeply involved in the details.”