Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:

Leaders must prepare those coming behind them to stand up so that, when the time comes, they can responsibly stand down. This requires developing their judgment, giving them the authority to act and ensuring they can carry responsibility when the leader is no longer in the room.

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The title of today’s SAJ post could well be a rally cry for all leaders. A confirmation for those coming up behind them – what’s at stake…what is the expectation. “I’m not going to be here forever,” you can almost hear your Managing Director saying to you. “One day you will have to lead.”

The title, (which I actually heard during Season 1, Episode 1 of Terminal List, Dark Wolf) seems to be a deliberate echo of a phrase used repeatedly by US President George W. Bush during the Iraq War:

As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

Bush used it in 2005 to describe the strategy of training Iraqi security forces until they could assume responsibility and American troops could withdraw.

That history contains a word of caution:

Training people to perform tasks is not necessarily the same as developing their ability to carry responsibility.

The Iraqi experience exposed precisely that: Numbers of people trained and equipped could be counted, while readiness, institutional leadership, cohesion, logistics, judgment and the willingness to act remained far harder to establish. Some assessments criticized the emphasis on how many people had completed training because it obscured their continuing dependence on outside support.

Part of the U.S. training effort involved developing greater initiative among Iraqi commanders.

Decentralized command put simply, is when the leader defines the purpose, the required outcome and the relevant boundaries. People closer to the situation are then trusted to decide how best to respond—even when events do not follow the original plan.

U.S. trainers attempted to encourage Iraqi platoon and company commanders to take greater initiative on the battlefield. This was difficult within a command structure that remained strongly top-down and did not readily reward independent action.

Let’s take a look at what happens in an organization where dependency is central…

• Everything must return to one person for approval.
• Employees know how to complete tasks but cannot respond when circumstances change.
• The leader repeatedly complains that people are not taking ownership.
• People have responsibility on paper but not enough authority or information to exercise it.
• Progress slows whenever the leader is unavailable.

My question is – what are we training for? Are we training people to follow a prescribed “how-to” for every possible situation, without developing their ability to interpret what is happening, decide what to do and carry the responsibility that comes with it?

Leaders may say they cannot stand down because their people are not ready.

But what has the leader done—or failed to do—that keeps their people in a state of unreadiness?

Standing down prematurely is not empowerment. It can be abandonment.

People need competence, context, clarity, authority and access to the information required to make sound decisions. They also need to know that a reasonable decision will not be punished simply because the outcome was imperfect.

Standing down must also be earned by leaders and those being trained to lead.

It does not mean that the leader becomes irrelevant. In fact, the leader becomes more effective by doing two things well:

One: Asking better questions…

• Do I intervene before people have finished thinking?
• Do I provide answers instead of developing judgment?
• Do I withhold information and then question the quality of their decisions?
• Do I punish reasonable mistakes?
• Do I confuse doing something differently with doing it incorrectly?
• Has being indispensable become part of how I understand my value?

Two: Stepping away from decisions others are now equipped to make and directing leadership attention towards the next challenge.

The real evidence of leadership may not be how well things work while the leader is present. It may be how people interpret, decide and act when the leader is no longer in the room.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Are you training people to follow your instructions—or developing them to stand up so that you can stand down?

About Giselle

For nearly three decades, I’ve worked with leaders across the Caribbean facing problems that keep returning, solutions that haven’t delivered the expected results, or changes that prove difficult to implement.

When I ask business owners what problem they can’t seem to solve, the answer is usually “people.”

So I ask them to tell me more, because people and businesses are rarely as simple as they first appear.

I help them understand what’s really causing the problem before they spend more money trying to fix it. And where needed, I help design an appropriate solution and work with their teams to implement it effectively.

What are you trying to make sense of right now?