Insight Inclusive leadership and management practices
Leadership should not disappear when the leader leaves the room
The test of transferable leadership often begins the moment the person who usually decides is no longer in the room.
THE SYMPTOM
Everything works, as long as the same person is there.
Some organizations show excellent signs: decisions get made quickly, files move forward, teams are satisfied. Then the person who was holding the thread goes away for two weeks, changes roles, or leaves. Within days, decisions slow down, trade-offs get escalated, and questions no one was asking suddenly appear in numbers.
This is not a competence problem among the people who stayed. It is a transmission problem: what made it possible to decide had never left one person's head.
An organization can have many managers and still depend on very few decision-makers.
WHAT WAS NOT PASSED ON
Tasks are delegated far more easily than criteria.
Handing over a task is simple: it has a beginning, an end and a verifiable result. Handing over a decision is far less so, because a decision assumes criteria: what you give weight to, what you accept sacrificing, what you never compromise on.
Yet those criteria are rarely stated. They formed through experience, they seem obvious to the person who holds them, and it does not naturally occur to them to explain them. So they pass on the conclusion — “in that case, we do it this way” — without the reasoning behind it. The day the situation differs slightly, the learned conclusion no longer helps, and the person escalates the question.
WHAT DEPENDENCE PRODUCES
An organization also learns not to decide.
When every decision goes up to the same people, the team adjusts: it learns to wait, to prepare the request rather than the solution, not to decide even in obvious cases. That behaviour is often read as a lack of initiative. It is in fact successful learning: the team has understood perfectly what is expected of it here.
That is why fixes aimed at individuals work poorly. You can ask for more autonomy, encourage it, measure it: as long as the last decision escalated was taken back over, the real message stays the same.
THE TEST
What happens during an absence is the real measure.
There is no need to set up an exercise. Absences already exist: vacation, leave, travel, long meetings. It is enough to look at what was decided during them, what waited, and what was decided and then taken back over on return — that last category being the most instructive.
What, last week, waited for my return with no real reason?
Transferable leadership does not mean everyone decides everything. It means everyone knows what they can decide, within what limits, and what they have to account for. That is what remains when the leader leaves the room.
This text goes deeper into one dimension of our expertise The full argument, the evidence and the possible forms of engagement are set out on the expertise page.
Inclusive leadership and management practicesCONTINUE
Other insights on inclusive leadership.
- Insight Inclusive leadership plays out where the work actually happens A policy can be common to the whole organization. Yet a team's experience of it is built in very local decisions.
- Insight Training managers is not enough A training room can open up awareness. On its own, it does not transform how a team is managed on Monday morning.
- Insight A title gives you a responsibility. Not necessarily the right to act. The org chart says who is accountable. Daily life reveals who can actually decide without asking permission.
- Insight The next big challenge for managers is already here Some responsibilities end up changing the very way people manage. Martin Lépine saw one take hold twenty years ago. He sees another one today.