Introduction
Welcome to the leadership paradox. Let’s start with a scenario. You joined your company many years ago, starting in a more junior role, where you proved your skill sets over and over. Maybe you were a born salesperson, maybe you were a master at client relations, maybe you were product focused, perhaps something else entirely. Regardless, with every task and every further year at the company, you demonstrated your value. As such, you were rewarded with a series of promotions. Eventually you found yourself in a management position, the leadership role you’d always wanted. Sounds great. All is well, right?
Not necessarily. Because once you’d reached this position, you discovered that the skills you’d demonstrated to get there weren’t needed anymore. You’d ceased to be the one selling; you’d ceased the one fronting the call; you’d ceased to be the one making decisions around specification. You might have still tried to do all those things, to involve yourself heavily and bring yourself back to the fore. Perhaps you rolled up your sleeves and said your management style was “hands-on”, justified your involvement in lower-level projects by saying you were a lead from the front type.
To do so is only natural. After all, you got to where you are by being an achiever, someone who not only got things done but prided themselves on being the one actively doing them. And this is where the paradox lies. Because the skills that served you so well and earned you your promotion might be the very same ones preventing you from succeeding in your new role.
This notion is distilled to its essence in the title of Marshall Goldsmith’s bestselling book: “What got you here won’t get you there” [1]. Being a thriving part of the workforce and being a leader are two entirely different things. The skills are not the same. To achieve, you need to be able to get the best out of yourself. To lead, you need to be able to get the best out of other people.
Oftentimes, newly promoted leaders try to continue as they were before. They want to get their hands dirty, to micro-manage and ensure that every aspect of a project is marked by their fingerprints. But micro-management is not the answer. As Jesse Sostrin PhD, Global Head of Leadership, Culture & Learning at Philips, puts it, leaders need to be “more essential and less involved.” He adds, “the difference between an effective leader and a super-sized individual contributor with a leader’s title is painfully evident” [2].
For many, the adjustment is difficult and can take time. If a leader is too eager to imprint themselves on every aspect of a project, not only is the leader likely to end up feeling overstretched (according to Gallup research, managers are 27% more likely than individual contributors to strongly agree they felt a lot of stress during their most recent workday [3]) but the project will suffer too. Staff will come to feel constrained and undervalued. They may not feel they have the opportunity to grow or express themselves fully. They will be less likely to try new and innovative ideas with someone breathing down their neck or dictating that they must service a single vision at all times rather than being allowed to bring themselves to the fore.
In other words, micro-management offers a whole lot of downsides in exchange for very few upsides. Sostrin proposes that a useful way for a manager to tell if they are taking on too much responsibility is by answering the simple question: If you had to take an unexpected week off work, would your initiatives and priorities advance in your absence? [4] A well-functioning team run by an effective leader should in theory be able to get by without that leader – for a period of time, at least. Whereas an organisation that orbits around the whims of a single figure is likely to stall, and fast. It’s why all good managers practice delegation.
Why delegate?
Delegation is something every business practices but not all do well. Just handing an employee some of the work does not count as delegation in any meaningful sense. Successful delegation involves genuinely trusting the employee and granting them autonomy. That can be a scary prospect for a leader used to having a controlling stake in all output. But there are ways to ensure that even without constant supervision, your team is working in a manner you approve.
The first is obviously to hire smart, capable workers to whom you feel comfortable delegating responsibility. Oftentimes leaders take on extra workplace burdens out of a lack of faith in their team. They think, “I’m not confident they have the ability to do the task,” and so instead choose to take it on themselves. But trust is paramount to any successful workplace. And to paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, the best way to know if you can trust an employee is to trust them – at least until they give you a reason not to. The best thing a leader can do is give their employees a chance and see what happens.
After all, a leader’s job is to get the best out of their employees. As Forbes writer Cynthia Knapek puts it, “Some people work to show you what their superpower is, but a good leader works to show you yours…you’ll never be a good delegator if you’re holding on to the belief that no one can do it as well as you can” [5].
Trusting your team – and shedding the arrogance of presuming you can do everything better yourself – is pivotal to good leadership. Refusing to cede control is the sign of an insecure leader, one who sees their role and status as proportional to their decision-making authority. They think that any act of delegation would lead to a dilution of their power.
This theory is backed up by a 2017 study on psychological power and the delegation of authority by Haselhuhn, Wong and Ormiston. They ultimately found that, “individuals who feel powerful are more willing to share their decision making authority with others. In contrast, individuals who feel relatively powerless are more likely to consolidate decision making authority and maintain primary control” [6]. Delegation is a sign of strength, not weakness. Consolidation of all authority is the remit of the insecure.
Another thing leaders can do to help ensure their team is working autonomously but towards a clear end goal is to have a solid set of principles in place. These principles shouldn’t just highlight the leader’s values and goals but make clear the approach they want to use to achieve them. Shift Thinking founder and CEO Mark Bonchek calls such a set of principles a company’s “doctrine”. Bonchek argues that, “without doctrine, it’s impossible for managers to let go without losing control. Instead, leaders must rely on active oversight and supervision. The opportunity is to replace processes that control behavior with principles that empower decision-making” [7].
Having a guiding set of principles in place lets you delegate responsibility more freely because you know that even with limitless autonomy, your employees are aware of the parameters they should be working within – it keeps them drawing within the lines.
Evidently, a pivotal part of leadership is and always will be people management. But if a leader has already clearly defined their principles, they’ll find they need to manage their people much less. Some companies that advocate for principles-based management include Amazon, Wikipedia and Google. The proof is in the pudding.
Effective delegation
How delegation is handled contributes enormously to what kind of company one is running and what kind of leader one is. For example, consider two scenarios. In scenario one, a tired and over involved leader, seeing that they have taken on more than they can chew with a deadline fast approaching, tells one of their team that they no longer have time to do a report that they were meant to be writing and so thrusts it on the employee to hastily pick up the slack.
In scenario two, a leader identifies a member of their team who they want to write a report for them. They talk to the employee and tell them that they’ve noticed the employee’s precision in putting facts across concisely and engagingly and want them to put those skills to use in this latest report. They talk through what they want from the project and why this employee is the perfect person to achieve those goals. They make known that they are available for support should any be needed.
In both examples, the boss is asking their employee to write a report. But in one that work is something fobbed off on the employee, a chore the leader no longer wants to do. In the second example, the leader is identifying the skills of a member of their team, letting the employee know that these are the skills needed for the task at hand and thus giving the employee an idea of what’s needed from them as well as a confidence boost.
Sostrin suggests four strategies for successful delegation [8]. First, to start with reasoning. As in the example above, this includes telling someone not just what work they want done but why – and that means both why they are working towards a certain goal and why the employee is the person to do it.
Second, to inspire their commitment. This, again, is about communication. By relaying the task at hand, their role in it and why it’s important, they can understand the bigger picture, not just their specific part of it. They’re then more able to bring themselves to the project, rather than viewing it as simply a tick-box exercise they’re completing for their boss.
Third, to engage at the right level. Of course delegation doesn’t mean that a leader should hand work over to their employees and then never worry about it again. They should maintain sufficient engagement levels so that they can offer support and accept accountability, but do so without stifling their team. The right balance depends on the organisation, the project and the personnel involved, but Sostrin suggests that simply asking staff what level of supervision they want can be a good start.
Fourth, to practise saying “yes”, “no”, and “yes, if”. That means taking on demands that you think are best suited to you, saying “yes, if” to those that would be better off delegated to someone more suited to that specific task, and giving outright “no”s to those you don’t deem worthwhile.
For example, Keith Underwood, COO and CFO of The Guardian, said that he doesn’t delegate when “the decision involves a sophisticated view of the context the organisation is operating in, has profound implications on the business, and when stakeholders expect me to have complete ownership of the decision” [9].
Kelly Devine, president of Mastercard UK and Ireland, says, “The only time I really feel it’s hard to delegate is when the decision is in a highly pressurised, contentious, or consequential situation, and I simply don’t want someone on my team to be carrying that burden alone” [10].
On top of these four, it’s worth adding the benefits around communicating high-profile, critical company decisions to your team, whether that be layoffs, new investors, or whatever the case may be. Leaders should want their employees to feel part of the organisation. That means keeping them in the loop of not just what is happening but why. Transparency is highly valued and in turn valuable.
In summary
It can be all too easy for managers who rose through the corporate ranks to eschew delegation in favour of an auteur-esque approach – shaping a team in their distinct image, if not actively trying to do all the work themselves. But delegation not only makes life less tiring and stressful for the leader, who cannot possibly hope to cover everyone’s work alone, but it also results in a happier, more productive, and likely more capable workforce, one that feels trusted and free to experiment rather than constrained by fear of failure.
Good ideas come from anywhere. Good organisations are built on trust. Good leaders don’t smother their workers but empower them. And with each empowered collaborator, the likelihood of collective success grows.
More on Trust
Leadership in Focus: Foundations and the Path Forward
Unleashing Leadership Excellence with Dan Pontefract (podcast)
References
[1] https://marshallgoldsmith.com/book-page-what-got-you-here/
[2] https://hbr.org/2017/10/to-be-a-great-leader-you-have-to-learn-how-to-delegate-well
[4] https://hbr.org/2017/10/to-be-a-great-leader-you-have-to-learn-how-to-delegate-well
[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886916311527
[7] https://hbr.org/2016/06/how-leaders-can-let-go-without-losing-control
[8] https://hbr.org/2017/10/to-be-a-great-leader-you-have-to-learn-how-to-delegate-well
[9] https://hbr.org/2023/03/5-strategies-to-empower-employees-to-make-decisions
[10] https://hbr.org/2023/03/5-strategies-to-empower-employees-to-make-decisions
Job satisfaction is something we all strive for but by no means all attain. There are various reasons for us to slip into feelings of apathy around our work. We may feel that we are being overlooked and that our skillsets are not being put to good use; we may feel that we are overworked and burnt out or maybe overwhelmed with stress; perhaps a lack of proper work-life balance is impacting our relationship with our friends and family; maybe we don’t fit in with our colleagues or are not contributing as effectively as those around us; or perhaps we even feel that we followed the wrong career path altogether – that the rung of the ladder is less of the issue than the ladder itself. Dissatisfaction is likely to come to all workers at some point. Oftentimes it passes, proving itself to be no more than a tough project or bad day at the office. But if the problem is consistent and/or stifling, action may need to be taken. For those who don’t think the job itself is the problem so much as how they’re handling it, a potential solution is work crafting.
What is work crafting?
Tims et al. (2012)1 define crafting as “the changes employees may make to balance their job demands and job resources with their personal abilities and needs.” The ultimate aim of doing this is to inject work with greater meaning and make it more engaging2. Essentially, without changing our job in any tangible sense – title, deliverables etc. – we ‘craft’ a new, more personalised version of our existing role to make it one that we can better love and thrive in, one “where we still can satisfy and excel in our functions, but which is simultaneously more aligned with our strengths, motives, and passions.”3
Employers may be reading that and biting their nails, but fear not, job crafting is not a license for employees to entirely reconstruct their role, ignoring the aspects of their job they find tedious and unrewarding and replacing them with exclusively grand and shiny tasks that provoke feelings of fulfilment. While management of tasks does factor into work crafting, the more important aspect is based around meaning. As argued by Berg et al. (2008)4, “job crafting theory does not devalue the importance of job designs assigned by managers; it simply values the opportunities employees have to change them.”
Job crafting vs Job design
The CIPD define job design as, “the process of establishing employees’ roles and responsibilities and the systems and procedures that they should use or follow.”5 Its purpose revolves around optimising processes in the workplace to create value and maximise performance. So far, so similar to job crafting. The key difference between the two lies in who is doing the decision-making.
In job design, an employer will be setting boundaries and assigning tasks based on their best understanding of their employees, making a conscious effort to give them work that will reward them and suit their skillsets. In job crafting, it is employees taking the reins. Workers are proactive, and the approach places their wellbeing front and centre. Again, that may be ground that employers are nervous to cede, but job crafting has been linked to better performance, motivation, and employee engagement6.
The three key forms of job crafting
There are various (and varying) approaches to job crafting, but three approaches are most common.
- Task crafting
This is the aspect we have focused on so far, with employees taking a more hands-on approach to their workloads. That could refer to work location (opting to work from home or on a hybrid basis, for example), time management (choosing hours that better suit their life commitments or generally working outside of a traditional 9-5 timeframe), or the tasks themselves (adding or removing tasks from their workload).
The examples around location and working hours are increasingly uncontroversial, especially in the wake of the pandemic. It is the third (employees selecting which tasks they wish to take on) that is the most divisive. Though it should be noted that generally task crafting involves taking on additional tasks rather than removing others. For example, a chef may take it upon themselves to not just serve food but to create aesthetically pleasing plates that enhance a customer’s dining experience. Or a bus driver might decide to give helpful sightseeing advice to tourists along his route7. Potentially an employee working in an administrative capacity may wish to become more engaged with the business, so learn a new software or sales technique, or become more actively involved with clients.
- Relationship crafting
Relationship crafting, unsurprisingly, is all about relationships. Primarily, relationships in the workplace. Having poor interpersonal relationships with colleagues has been found to be a significant contributor to workplace stress8. Conversely, positive work relationships are shown to increase job satisfaction, as well as general mood. By taking a more enthusiastic approach to workplace relationships, whether in or out of office hours, employees are thought to become more engaged with the company and feel more fulfilled in their role.
- Cognitive crafting
Cognitive crafting is all about how we frame the work we do. By assigning meaning to tasks that were conceivably uninspiring or outright deflating before, we can reshape our outlook, instilling our work and lives with a greater sense of purpose, and thus fulfilment. For example, a maid reframing the idea of changing a hotel guest’s bedsheets from a chore to a way to improve someone else’s holiday. Or a customer service worker approaching their clients’ problems like they were a therapist, looking to genuinely make their life better. Framing work tasks in a more positive manner can make work a far more enriching experience, and, unsurprisingly, removing any self-made narratives that what we’re doing is pointless improves mood no end.
Autonomy
The overarching benefit of crafting is the autonomy it affords employees. By giving workers control over how they spend and approach their time, they are able to feel a sense of achievement that might otherwise be lacking. And achievement breeds motivation for more, not to mention the added confidence and sense of worth it affords. A study by Steelcase9 found that when people have greater control over their experiences in the workplace, they become more engaged, which naturally results in greater performance.
Tellingly, studies on the happiness of women in the workplace10 found that there was no difference in mood across participants who worked full-time, part-time or didn’t work at all. Instead, the correlation between the women who were happiest was that they were the ones able to choose their work hours and professions. People have no problem committing to hard work, so long as it’s of their own volition, or offering them a benefit in return, even or especially if that benefit is solely personal fulfilment. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Nickel and Dimed11, found that workers who had little control over the schedules found it disempowering and disabling.
Conclusion
Work-life balance is oft-discussed, and understandably so. We want to be able to enjoy our lives outside of work. This is arguably more important (and harder) now than ever as the lines continue to blur between our homes and workplaces, and our personal and professional devices. Less discussed is how we imbue our work lives with value. A healthy work-life balance should not entail misery during work hours and blissful respite when free. Rather, we should take steps to ensure that our professional days are filled with rewarding moments, whether that be because we’re performing tasks we want to be performing, framing our actions in a healthy, self-loving way, or performing those tasks with people that make it all worthwhile.
Crafting, whether of the task, relationship, or cognitive variety, offers us a way to feel more engaged and fulfilled, to improve our performance, and to take strides towards achieving professional goals we want to conquer. Lost for meaning in your professional life? Give crafting a try.
References
1 Tims, M., Bakker, A., and Derks, D. (2012). Development and validation of the job crafting scale. J. Vocat. Behav. 80, 173–186. doi: 10.1016/j.jvb.2011.05.009
2 https://hbr.org/2020/03/what-job-crafting-looks-like
3 Wrzesniewski, A., Berg, J. M., & Dutton, J. E. (2010). Turn the job you have into the job you
want. Harvard Business Review, June, 114-117.
4 Berg, Justin M., et al. “What Is Job Crafting and Why Does It Matter.” Retrieved Form the Website of Positive Organizational Scholarship on April, vol. 15, 2008, p. 2011.
5 https://www.cipd.co.uk/knowledge/strategy/organisational-development/job-design-factsheet#gref
6 https://positivepsychology.com/job-crafting/
7 https://positivepsychology.com/job-crafting/
8 https://positivepsychology.com/positive-relationships-workplace/
9 https://info.steelcase.com/global-employee-engagement-workplace-comparison#key-finding-2
11 APA. Ehrenreich, B. (2010). Nickel and dimed. Granta Books.
