Aug/090
Sharing Responsibility
This is one article from my eBook: Challenging The Way To Manage. Enjoy!
Overview
One of the biggest questions that leaders nowadays ask is: how to grow the organization without destroying the dynamics and fast reaction times? Well, as far as I’m concerned the answer is pretty simple: sharing the responsibility – organizing the team to be able to answer to these two things by themselves.
What Is The Problem Then?
In the end, the real problem is anybody with a lot of power, they are afraid to give it away because it makes them vulnerable. Well, guess what? That is the whole freaking point of it!
After you start sharing the responsibility your actions will be questioned, which makes you a human again, which is the way it should be. What I mean is that whenever somebody has too much power in their hands they become some kind of ‘gods’ whose orders will not be questioned. If you know somebody like that, in the long term, that kind of setup is going to fail. Challenging each other or more commonly said ‘sparring’ is one of the most important tools you’ll ever meet for learning and making better decisions.
Let’s take a quick example: you give the responsibility of coding guidelines to somebody else as you haven’t had time to think about them in a year. Very soon, this person will most likely come to you and ask what do you think if we would change this, or even better don’t come to you, instead he brings these things up inside the team and ask about what they think about the ideas. If everyone agrees, there should not be any reason why these could not be implemented (the change comes from inside the team). Remember that when you are sharing the responsibility to a person, he must understand to iterate the changes through the team – make sure he doesn’t become the ‘god’ person.
There is nothing more dangerous than a person who holds too much information and power, because in the end we are all humans – he cannot do more than me or you! This means that he will not be able to do all the tasks he is assigned in to. That is where the trouble begins and people start talking about like: “He is not doing anything about that issue! He doesn’t care!”
Do you see the problem? It reflects both to the management and to the team. Management doesn’t have time and the team thinks they do not do anything because they don’t care. Ouch…
Where to Start?
Talk to the team members and find out what they are interested in. This way you’ll be able to share the responsibility to right people, motivate them and you’ll most likely get them closer to their personal goals. Also do not forget to support them and make sure they understand what their responsibility is!
Results
Simply put, succeeding in this will create a self-managing team. There will be a point where you notice the team starting to make decisions of its own without your help. This is also a very good way to grow new leaders.
