10 Commandments of Leadership-Not Breeding Sheep

Sheep. 

Need constant attention.  Need to be told and shown every step along the way.  Not thinking.  Not deciding.  Not innovating.  Just following and doing what they are told.  Nothing more and nothing less.

Bah.

Sheep in the Workplace

Even if you have never left the comfortable confines of the big city, you have been exposed to sheep at work. 

They are the people that require constant direction, sometimes the same direction, over and over again.  They cannot solve problems, cannot think creatively, cannot deal with change and cannot make decisions.  There will never be independent risk taking.  They develop a co-dependence on leaders to guide them on a constant and continuous basis.  They require a great deal of time to get even simple things accomplished.

There is no correlation between the amount of money paid to, the education level of or the type of job in which sheep congregate.  Sheep come in all sizes, salary levels and ages.

Why Sheep are Bad

When sheep become pervasive in a working environment, they will suck all of the valuable time and energy from a leader.  They are very needy and require tons of time to manage.

Sheep also place a grossly unfair burden on leaders to have all of the answers and all of the ideas.  Effective leadership must be able to capitalize on the ideas of his or her team and not just rely on their own creativity or innovation skills. 

The presence of sheep in the workplace also create a paradigm shift in many leaders.  When forced to deal with sheep, many leaders will micro-manage everyone using the assumption that all team members need that level of instruction and daily direction.  Nothing will alienate a leader and render them ineffective faster than consistent micromanagement.

Sheep also have a significant impact on overall performance of an organization and the quality of service provided to your customers.  Because decisions are bottlenecked back to the leader, effectiveness in reduced.  When customer issues require leadership intervention, the service experience suffers.

Who is Responsible for Sheep

Now for the hard part.  You may struggle swallowing this for a minute but if you are truly self-honest, it should resonate.

To truly understand the origin of workplace sheep, we must examine recruiting, hiring and interviewing processes.  Do you look for smart, experienced and thinking job candidates?  In the interview process, do the job candidates indicate that they will need instruction on every step of the way and will need you to answer the same question multiple times?  Do you pride yourself on being an employer of choice?

Well, if indeed you hire bright candidates that claim to have some levels of decision making and independence, where, when and how do they become sheep-like?

This is where the answer becomes a little painful.  We breed them.

Through our management and supervision skills we breed sheep.  Through our organization's policies and procedures we breed sheep.  Through our lack of providing feedback we breed sheep and through our taking a quick approach rather than a long term approach, we breed sheep.

Like it or not, we play the most significant role in turning a team member from a bright and ambitious rising star into a sheep.  When we provide all the answers, avoid positive feedback and stifle innovation, we are building our flock.

An Interesting Conundrum

One of the most interesting observations over the past twenty years has been that the managers and supervisors that complain most about how their team members cannot think, make decisions or be creative are also the managers and supervisors that most actively breed sheep.

You can't have it both ways.  You either use the skills to stop breeding sheep or you resign yourself to using the skills that made them that way.

In large part, this is not about them, it is about you as the leader.  Our team members can be led to growth and development or led to mediocrity and a life of being a sheep.  The choice is that of the leader.

The effective leader does not want sheep.  The effective leader needs a team that thinks, decides and creates and frees the leader to move forward.  The effective leader works actively to eliminate sheep and build a team that can respond and drive without her or him.

Stop Being the Answer Man

One of my most frustrating childhood memories involves asking my mom how to spell a word and receiving her stock response of "look it up."  She knew how to spell the word and she knew that her answer frustrated me but she said it consistently and constantly until I stopped asking.

Stopped asking her to spell the word and looking for it first in the dictionary.  She taught me how to problem solve and think.  She could have answered my question but I would not have grown and learned on my own.  Well done mom.

The first step in reducing and eliminating sheep and sheep-like behavior in your team is to cease being the answer man. 

This is an area in which the enemy you fight has an outpost on the top of your shoulders.  It is powerful to have the answers.  People look to you as the brightest bulb in a room.  You are a walking Wikipedia of work knowledge.

With every question that you answer, you are strengthening the chain of co-dependence to you and micromanaging the work environment.  When you answer the question of a team member, you are subtly telling them that they do not need to think because you will provide all the answers that they need.

Don't underestimate this ego battle.  It is so cool to ride your white horse to the rescue of your team members and fix their dilemmas. They need you.  They tell you how important you are.  It feels good.  You have the knowledge and the power and they love you for it.  Bah.

The most effective leader will inquire behind team member questions about what they believe is right.  That sounds like "what do you think you should do Leon?"  Further ratcheting this up response you might say something like "Terri, you saw the same issue last week and worked through it nicely." 

Some leaders will hesitate asking questions back because they fear it will make them look weak and unknowing.  The opposite is quite true.  It is the leader secure in his or her skill set and competencies as a leader that will not rely on being the answer person and seek to grow the knowledge and abilities of their team.

The absolute most effective leaders create and share power and not just store it up.  In the equation of forcing team members to think and articulate their own solutions, you are shifting power to them and creating real growth in your team.

When asked, ask back.  Don't be the leader with all the answers, be the leader with all the questions.  If you persist in having all the answers, congratulations, you have made yourself invaluable and you are in the last job you will ever have.

Feedback is the Key

As discussed at great length in previous commandments of effective leadership, feedback is an important element of the stoppage of sheep breeding.

Team members need to hear positive feedback, unchained of course, when their decisions were good and they made good choices.  The absence of this feedback will start a line forming at your office door so team members can "just run something by you."  If you didn't recognize this phenomenon, the team members are asking for validation of their decisions or direction and they are not hearing it from you on a regular basis.

The other element of sheep breeding related to feedback is hyper-criticality.  When the leader constantly second guesses, criticizes or adds onto the decisions and judgments from team members, she or he is creating an environment in which team members will hesitate in any decision.  Why should they bother making a decision or attempting to innovate when all they hear is criticism or comparisons to how the leader would have done something.  In addition to stifling the creativity and decision making, this type of approach will also kill off big chunks of morale in even the most enthusiastic team members.

Even when a team member makes a poor choice or decision, it is not automatically a trigger for corrective feedback as much as it becomes a teachable moment.  Your role as an effective leader requires you to know when to provide corrective feedback and when to be a teaching coach.  More often than not, it is as a teacher.

Stop Saving Them from Themselves

For those of us that are parents, we realize all the oxygen we used to tell the kids to not touch the stove when lit was absolutely wasted.  We showed them.  We told them it would burn.  We said it was dangerous.

They touched it anyways. 

It hurt.  They learned their lesson.

And with that transaction, leaders should see a valuable lesson in how team members learn and grow.  You will never be able to save your team members from themselves and you will never be able to warn them of all potential outcomes until they try something and fail themselves.

Like our children, the most valuable lessons for team members in their growth and development is often failure.  Success teaches some lessons but the ones that stick with us the most are the points of our failure.  As leaders, we need to allow our team members to fail for their ultimate growth and development.

Now a special note to those who may think this is reckless.  When the risks associated with failure include physical harm, loss of organizational integrity or credibility, significant financial harm or even the loss of a great customer, the leader must mitigate this risk and prevent horrible things from occurring.  By contrast, if the risks associated with failure are minor, even when you know the team member is going to fail, you must let them.  They will never learn and grow if you do not let them fail.

Another area of allowing failure is in pure job performance.  You cannot compromise your expectations of performance and behavior.  If you compromise once, you will need to be prepared to compromise often.  If the team member is not meeting expectations, they are not meeting expectations and need to receive your best efforts from a coaching perspective.  If they are still not performing, the failure is theirs and not yours. 

Not every team member is in the right job at the right organization.  Effective leadership is not about saving everyone but about making sure the right people are in the right roles.  It is not a failure on your part when you have to let a team member go after the right amount of coaching and teaching.  If they have to go, they have to go.  Both the team member and the organization need this transaction.

Require Decisions and Innovation

An odd competency to discuss in decision making and innovation in team members.  Many leaders are hesitant to require decision making and look at that skill set as a bonus and not a necessity.

Decision making is a competency and skill no different from keyboard speed, widget assembly or any other core job requirement.  As such it should be required and memorialized in job descriptions and expectation documents.  If a team member continues to make errors in widget assembly, they are coached and the same should occur related to decisions.

So it is with innovation.  Not everyone is as creative as the next person but innovation can certainly be encouraged if not required.  The effective leader recognizes, rewards and encourages all team members to present ideas and to look at things differently.  The effective leader promotes trying new methods and processes as well as keeps an open mind to the ideas of others.

Requiring innovation is a little bit of a different beast.  Effective leaders have learned that pretty much everyone in their organization have ideas, creativity and innovation in them but many are hesitant, for a variety of reasons, to share.  To get those ideas out, effective leaders have built safe, non-judgmental and regular systems to require innovation from all team members.

The best operational model of required innovation is to provide an issue, challenge or problem on a sheet of paper.  Distribute that to all team members and request that they provide up to three possible solutions or ideas within the next couple of days.  The deadline provides the needed requirement for them to focus their thoughts and not dream endlessly about it while the anonymity of the written request provides safety for those who will not speak in brainstorming sessions.  There will be much more on this process in the innovation commandment.

There is great news about sheep.  As quickly has we bred them or inherited them as the case may be, we can unwind those behaviors through the consistent application of effective leadership skills.