Great leaders recognize they can’t do it all themselves, so they distribute control to extend the capacity and motivation of their team.

People in authority need to be less like chess masters or puppeteers, controlling every move, and more like farmers, creating good soil conditions, planting in season, and doing all they can to support growth.

Neuroscience tells us that the brain flourishes when it is given an appropriate amount of control—appropriate to our level of competence and confidence. On the flipside, the brain shuts down when it is stifled by unnecessary controls.

David Marquet, former US Nuclear Submarine Captain, learned that superior results can be achieved when giving up control in an environment of high competence and high clarity. In other words, he made sure he had a team of highly competent individuals who had the information and clarity needed to make the best possible decisions and take the best possible actions without him controlling every move.

Marquet admits that giving away control will feel unnatural and uncomfortable at first, but over time it becomes easier, especially as superior results are achieved.

Marquet defines leadership as embedding the capacity for greatness in the people and practices of an organization and decoupling it from the personality of the leader.

Marquet shares his effective approach in the following 10 minute video:

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.

Where does ability come from? And what leads to greater success?

In her 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck, says individuals can be placed on a continuum according to their implicit views of where ability comes from. 

If you believe that success comes from innate ability you have a “fixed” mindset. If, on the other hand, you believe that success is based on hard work, learning, training, and persistence you have a “growth” mindset.

This is important because individuals with a growth mindset are more likely to work hard despite setbacks. Fixed mindset individuals dread failure because it is seen as a negative statement on their basic abilities, while growth mindset individuals don’t mind or fear failure as much because they realize their performance can be improved and learning comes from failure.

In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.

Great leaders praise effort rather than intelligence.

They will say things like, “good job, you worked very hard,” rather than, “good job, you are very smart.” The former develops a growth mindset, while the latter contributes to a fixed mindset.

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.

Your team cannot achieve more than what the individual players have the capability and capacity to achieve (i.e. their collective potential). Too many sales teams throw “Hail Marys” and try to get their players to run after and catch the pass. Without assessing the collective potential of the players the monthly sales effort can, and often is, an exercise in futility, if not insanity.

It is more effective to assess the true potential of each individual compared to their current performance and then work with the individuals to achieve their potential. One way to do this is to undertake the Potential-Performance Exercise (see video below which explains how to do so).

The collective potential of the players determines the team’s sustainable capability and capacity. If the collective potential is less than the desired goal it is time to expand the team.

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.

The 2^nd habit of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey) is to begin with the end in mind. I believe this speaks not only to destination, but to intent. 

Great leaders not only clearly define their vision (their prospect for a brighter future), but declare their INTENT for how this will be accomplished and WHY it is important. 

Using customer satisfaction surveys to demonstrate how this works, positive intent suggests providing customers with a great experience and using the survey as a feedback tool to assess how close the experience came to the expectation—then tweaking the process to raise the level of experience. Negative intent suggests coaching customers as to how to complete the survey so as to simply achieve a higher score. If true customer experience leading to loyalty is the desired outcome then positive intent is the only way to get there.

The concept of a team is to get like-minded people working together to achieve a common goal. In practice it is undeniable that more closely aligned teams achieve more than groups of talented people simply working together. Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, says “if you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

The first step in getting all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction is for the leader to declare intent. This is why it is so important to have a written vision statement and a written [core] values statement. Writing it down ensures that it is purposeful, defined, clear, actionable, and non-changing. Further, unless it is written it is virtually impossible to execute consistently and hard to keep the team aligned with it.

Your Vision and Values statements should be the first two pages in your Playbook and all of the subsequent pages, detailing the plays (processes), must be in alignment.

Herb Mast is a Leadership Coach and Employee Engagement Specialist. Learn how he can assist you in implementing the principles and concepts presented here.