L-POINTS

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it” Dwight D. Eisenhower

What was true for Eisenhower, in times of high stakes and fast changes, seems more than ever valid for 21st century leaders. They must continuously face such paradoxes and spend their time pursuing objectives which appear to be contradictory: ambition AND realism, short-term performance AND long-term investments, well-being at the workplace AND productivity, compliance to the rules AND innovation, etc.
It is also the case for marketing and sales professions: their success requires building client’s adhesion quickly and being able to develop a lasting partnership. How then can they answer the client’s needs AND create new trends, negotiate the price AND have the value of their offer respected, be the client’s ambassador inside their company AND their company’s ambassadors at the client’s?

“The essence of leadership is the ability to recognize dilemmas and to reconcile them. » Fons Trompenaars

How can today’s leaders combine these seemingly opposing objectives and create a long-term virtuous circle rather than a lame compromise?
The problem is that our time leaves us with many challenges and little time to handle them. How can we take the indispensable “step back” when the hectic rhythm of a globalized and digitally connected world pushes us to always accelerate and to react “on sight”.
Each of us can consequently be tempted to reduce their decisions to a “simple”, binary choice between two extremes. Unfortunately, each of these extremes may well offer as many risks and/or drawbacks as benefits. As we say in French “All excess is a fault”…

« The reverse also has a reverse. » Japanese saying

Let us take a classic dilemma: if, for instance, we tend to privilege speed and quality of execution of tasks – a good thing in itself – we can be tempted to make all decisions, or even to do it ourselves rather than delegate. The risk is then to be quickly overwhelmed… and thus to jeopardize both speed and quality of our work, not to mention the probable demotivation of our staff, deprived of opportunities to learn and to shine.
Is it then preferable to implement full-scale delegation? Not sure: if we leave too much autonomy, we risk to dash the initial briefing off, or to neglect sufficient control of the delegated tasks. Misunderstanding, conflict and chaos may then be just around the corner…

« Think like a man of action AND act like a man of thought. » Henri Bergson

In the case of delegation, an efficient solution would consist in leaving the binary level “delegate or do it myself” and doing some fine-tuning: delegating whilst enabling increasing quality and speed, in other words controlling in order to favour autonomy.
Concretely, it will for example mean:
- Choosing the delegatees with - of course - the necessary skills in mind, but also, every time it is possible – their interest for the subject or the type of task
- Setting a clear and measurable objective, ensuring it is correctly understood, managing the delegatee’s potential psychological resistance to change, remaining firm on the non-negotiable elements
- Boosting motivation, creativity, responsibility and autonomy of the team members by giving priority to their own solution while providing them with the necessary resources and help
- Deciding in common, right from the start of a follow-up meeting schedule, adapted to their maturity in the concerned area and respecting it systematically to avoid the usual “If I say nothing, consider it as a compliment” syndrome and its disastrous consequence “If I say something, it will be criticism”…
- Preparing and leading each follow-up meeting as an opportunity to help team members to grow and increase their autonomy by helping them to analyse their own performance – both what worked out well and what did not – and making them want to improve it continuously.