Have YOU Become the Roadblock to Innovation and Agility?

This newsletter is about leaders who are highly intelligent, extremely capable, adept managers with a strong track record.

Sounds good so far, right?

But today we are focused on how such talented individuals can become a bottleneck to change. And, yes, this might mean you.

The people I’m describing genuinely have their organization’s best interests at heart. They are highly competent. Peers and members of their team seek out and respect their opinion. They are rock steady.

But no matter how capable any single person is, they can’t possibly monitor and understand all the developments in a complex marketplace. If they allow others to rely on them for every key decision, it greatly increases the odds that some of those decisions will be wrong, or even disastrous.

Let me put it this way: the stronger you are as a leader and decision maker, the harder you must work to prevent others from simply deferring to you.

It’s essential that you enable others to make decisions, leaving room for them to learn by making mistakes from time to time.

It’s equally important that you encourage them to challenge your own perceptions, beliefs, and judgments.

Because no matter how capable you are, eventually you will run into something important that you don’t know or fully understand. When this happens, it will be far better for a member of your team to help you see this… than to proceed with a flawed plan.

The most valuable talent is bringing out talent in other people, and strong leaders must make sure that their own strengths don’t obscure the talent around them.

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