In many circles, leadership is seen as stepping up and “getting things done.” Which, by the way, can be true, but in many circumstances is not such a good idea, because stepping in and doing the job for someone is a quick way to stifle learning and creativity.

Effective leaders learn when to allow their people to pursue their own ideas, and, more importantly, are willing to give them the latitude to make mistakes. It might be easier to simply do the work for them, but trying and failing (or making a mistake or two) is a powerful learning tool. Good leaders know this because they have been down that road themselves; they have made mistakes and gained valuable insight and wisdom from the process. Saving their employees from that experience may seem like a good idea at the time, but the long-term benefits are compromised.

Deborah Dunsire, M.D., is the president and chief executive of Millennium, a pharmaceutical company specializing in oncology medication, and she was named the 2009 Healthcare Businesswoman’s Association Woman of the Year. In a recent NY Times interview entitled “Stepping Out of the Sandbox,” she discussed the idea of allowing people to fix their own problems:

The light bulb didn’t pop to full intensity right away. But I heard gentle feedback that, “You’re in my sandbox and we’re not accomplishing a lot being in here together.” I’ve also heard feedback from a team I worked with that said, “Gee, we know you’re good at this stuff and you’ve done it, but sometimes we need to kind of bang our heads a little bit more without you fixing it.”

I grew to understand more and more that the job of leadership is developing people, and that it involves not doing everything for them, but sometimes allowing them to stub their toe. The work may not come in perfectly, but the learning was much more effective, and people felt empowered to own the outcome in a different way. Putting that into practice was very hard for me because it’s very hard for me to see a problem and not try and fix it.

Again, strong leaders often rise to their positions in large part because of their ability to solve problems and get things done. Unfortunately, this may translate into becoming a particular type of leader – one who steps in to fix rather than to teach or coach. What effective leaders understand is that their primary role is to develop their people to be effective in their jobs, not to create a team of assistants to the leader.

Let Employees Develop Their Ideas

One particular application of this idea is the situation where subordinates present ideas or argue for a particular course of action. As Dunsire points out, if the leader identifies every potential flaw, employees will soon learn that discussion is a waste of time:

When a person is presenting a position, I’ll find any flaws in the logic. But when you’re senior and the other person is more junior, it becomes inappropriate to always point them out because it shuts down that person’s ability to discuss. So I learned to ask questions in a different way, because the feedback I got was that I just laser in on the flaws in the argument and start peeling them down and that feels very uncomfortable…

The last thing you want to do is really destroy somebody. I think that ability to argue and win would be better suited to a criminal courtroom than a business setting. There’s nothing wrong with the strength of being able to do that. The trick is how you manage that in the situation you’re in.

In many ways, this may be the most difficult lesson for young leaders to learn. Your employees will never reach their performance potential, nor will they enjoy working for you if they feel they have no room to grow. The quickest way to give that impression is to protect them from every potential mistake, or point out every flaw in their ideas.

Tagged as: creativity, Leadership, Learning