If I were to pick two words that describe the personal challenge most executives struggle with in their leadership development, it would be to move their internal operating systems from a focus on control, to one more focused on influence.
But please don’t let me be misunderstood. 😊
This is not a switch (i.e., control is bad, and influence is good). I am talking about adjusting the dial where you choose depending on what situation you are in, to dial up or dial down those two functions or capabilities of control or influence. Many have an overdeveloped and habitual control function, and an underdeveloped, reticent influence function. Control skills got you here. Influence skills are needed to play a broader, more complex leadership role in your future. Ironically, part of getting better at leading through influencing requires letting go of control.
What’s critical at higher levels of management is the ability to get work done through others. We can’t control others. We can only influence our team to perform. The other critical change is the importance of being able to influence (lead) horizontally with the areas you don’t control, across departmental walls. How does a leader influence other areas of the organization to be onside with her before she moves a project forward?
Having now worked with between 150-200 leaders over the last thirty years, I have observed a common pattern. Many have great difficulty in releasing the need to be on top of everything, enabling their team to take over things, that you have typically done, so that you can work ON the business (longer term development and strategic initiatives) and not stay stuck IN the business (day to day tasks and firefighting).
So many of my clients have said to me, when things aren’t going well, “I helicopter in and fix it myself rather than gathering the team together to look at the situation we are in and collaborate around a way out
of it. When I know I need to ask questions, my knee jerk response is to tell, tell, tell.”
The point is NOT to teach you new skills for how to influence; because even if you had these influencing skills, you likely wouldn’t utilize them. The developmental work is to help you discover personally what scares you, worries you, concerns you, about letting go of absolute control of your team’s output. Is your concern that awful consequences will occur if too much time is taken, or things aren’t done to your standards. We need to ask ourselves, are these “awful consequences” in fact real?
What enables our ability to dial down control and dial up influence, starts with making our internal self-protective RULES (never miss a deadline) and Limiting Beliefs (If we miss the deadline, then my reputation will be severely tarnished) conscious and visible, so we can challenge them in terms of level of threat and accuracy. Name it to tame it!
To move forward, we must first release our foot from the brake. Having released the brake, then you can objectively ask yourself, what am I called upon to do right now? Control or influence? Choose the right response.
