Put people’s feet to the fire, but don’t hold them there
Control feels good.
The feeling you get when someone does a task exactly what you want them feels fantastic.
It comes with a serious trade-off.
Trying to run people’s lives is exhausting. It doesn’t scale. Most importantly, it caps their ceiling. You limit their potential.
The alternative is to challenge them. Put your person in a position to win, make a landing zone, and let them go.
Make no mistake; there is more risk involved. If you can’t write the map, you rely on them to give you a post-mortem. This ambiguity causes errors. When you combine mistakes with some ambiguity, it feels worse.
There is a major upside here.
In my experience, every time I controlled what they (person working for me) did, I’d get maybe, half of their potential.
When I compare that to when I challenged them, I got closer to 75% to 95%. Then, every once in a while, I’d see the person’s potential level up.
My reward for dealing with the ambiguity and giving them agency was someone who I could trust. For that trust, they would delight me.
Agency matters. Let them have it.
From the desk of Adam Thomas 