Are You Teaching Your Managers to Wait for You?

"I need my managers to take more ownership."

I've heard some version of that in several businesses over the last few weeks, and in quite a few of those conversations I found myself gently turning the question back on the person asking it.

The frustration is usually real, but when you look closely at what happens day to day, the lack of ownership often turns out to be a fairly rational response to the way the people above have been leading.

One business I work with has a management team that's very good at following a plan. Give them a target and a process and they'll deliver it. What they're not so good at is noticing when circumstances change and adapting the plan themselves. Recently, the measures they were working to were being achieved, while a problem elsewhere in the business was getting bigger. Nobody raised it.

The natural reaction from the leadership team was frustration, followed by stepping in to fix it. And that's where we started talking about puppeteers and conductors. Every time leaders pull the strings to sort something out, people learn that if they wait long enough, someone above them will provide the answer. You can give a team authority on paper and still take it away in practice every time something goes wrong.

A different CEO had given one of his senior people responsibility for some difficult individuals in the business. What he hadn't done was make it clear to those individuals, or to anyone else, that this person now had his full backing. So people went round the new leader, straight back to the CEO, and the CEO kept getting pulled back into exactly the issues he was trying to hand over. Everyone could see that the responsibility had moved without the authority going with it.

Another CEO went away for two and a half weeks and the business largely coped without them. Most problems were dealt with and decisions were made without anyone picking up the phone. Their absence had removed the easiest escalation route and, in doing so, showed both them and the team what they were capable of handling themselves.

Later that month, the same CEO made an honest admission in a session with their leadership team. They said they’d probably been reading one of their colleagues' consulting and informing as a request for approval, when actually that person was simply telling them the decision they were making and why. That's an easy mistake to make, and it matters, because there's a big difference between someone saying "here's what I recommend, is there anything I'm missing?" and "what do you want me to do?" If leaders treat the first as if it were the second, people soon stop bothering to make the call themselves.

What's interesting is that none of this comes from leaders deliberately trying to control everything. Usually they're trying to help. They step in because someone is struggling, answer the question because it's quicker, or finish something because they can immediately see what's missing. It solves the problem in front of them, but if it happens often enough, people learn that bringing the problem upwards is easier than making the judgement themselves.

The classic Harvard Business Review article Who's Got the Monkey? described this decades ago, with managers ending up carrying their team's problems because they accepted them so readily. And David Marquet's account of turning round a US submarine shows what happens when a leader deliberately stops giving orders and instead makes sure people understand the intent well enough to decide for themselves. The common thread is that ownership has to be handed over and then left there, even when taking it back would be quicker.

I've written previously about why leadership teams keep bringing decisions back to the CEO, and decision rights and clear authority matter. But I'm increasingly convinced that the bigger lever sits with the leader's own behaviour in the moment, when someone brings them a problem and they have to decide whether to solve it or hand it back.

So if you want more ownership from your managers, it's worth asking yourself honestly what your reactions have been teaching them.

If you stepped away for a fortnight, which decisions would your managers make without you, and which would sit waiting for you to come back?

If you'd like to think this through for your own business, you can find out more about how I work with CEOs and leadership teams.

Nicola Gunstone is an executive coach working with CEOs and MDs of growing businesses. If this struck a chord, you can connect with her and follow the conversation on LinkedIn.