Chapter 12

Principle Ten: Give Control to Get Control

How long does it take for a radio signal to reach from the Earth to a Mars-roving robot? The answer is anything between 4 minutes and 22 minutes depending on the relative distances of the two planets. That means that if you want to control the Rover, you can’t just treat it like a drone, hooking up a camera to the front and steering it using a game controller back at mission control.

Why? Because in the 8 to 44 minutes it takes for the signal to yo-yo to Mars and back, your precious Rover could already have driven over the edge of a cliff. In order to control the Rover you have to build up and rely upon its ability to sense and respond to its surroundings autonomously. In order to complete the mission, you have to give control to get control.

In the same way, if you want an organisation that is responsive to the market and to customers, you can’t have every decision escalated to senior management. If you try that, you’ll be outmanoeuvred by more agile competitors. You’ll also create a sense of learned helplessness in your people. Nothing slows organisations down more than passivity and the waste of unnecessary waiting.

The lesson of the Mars Rover is especially useful when ­working with managers who consider themselves ‘hardnosed’. These ­managers often resist ideas such as empowerment and inclusion. They think such concepts are ‘touchy-feely’ and idealistic. But the lesson of the Mars Rover has nothing to do with recognition of its robotic dignity. It’s just the way the engineering has to be done.

Organisations that give control to get control reap the value of faster decision-making, closer to the action. In a world that is harder than ever to predict, that is a dependable advantage: customer issues are resolved more quickly, you can stay ahead of competitors, and projects spend less time spinning their wheels.

That said, devolution of control can go too far. The crucial issue for leaders is to balance autonomy and direct control.

Get This Done ‘Somehow’ or I’ll Find Someone Who Can

In a Middle European country in the 1930s, so the story goes, the ­management of a gun factory were told by the newly installed ­communist government to stop manufacturing arms, but to continue to keep the factory open, and to continue paying the workers. When they enquired about how they were supposed to achieve this, the one-word answer that came back was: ‘Somehow’.

Somehow Management is alive and well. It feels good to set a vision and then, like Jean-Luc Picard on the Starship Enterprise, say: ‘Make it so.’ And of course managers can claim that this constitutes delegation and empowerment – good things. But Picard is relying on a disciplined and highly trained crew with rigorous procedures worked out by rocket scientists. Even he can’t mandate the impossible, or if he cares about morale, the unreasonable.

Management by objectives is a fine approach. But as political demagogues consistently demonstrate, setting forth visions and goals is not enough. Delegation is not abdication, and even if they can’t do it all themselves, it’s the responsibility of managers to ensure that:

There are plenty of tools to do this, and quite often, there are competent people on staff who know them but aren’t listened to (granted sometimes these people are so inarticulate when discussing anything but methodology that they are their own worst enemies, but that is another story!).

It may feel like dynamic leadership, but it’s lazy and ineffective management to set forth a dramatic vision or stretch goal, and then mandate its achievement ‘somehow’, abdicating responsibility for designing a credible implementation scheme.

Under-determined methods and magical thinking – it’ll work ‘somehow’

‘Somehow Management’ is the idea that because you will something, or because you insist on it, or because it follows logically from your theory or ideology, that it will somehow – magically – come to pass. It’s saying ‘failure is not an option’ when it’s obvious that failure is very much an option, and a truly competent executive would be busy putting preventative and mitigating actions in place rather than relying on faith and affirmation.

As any BS artist knows (and as board directors should remember) you can go a long way by setting out a dramatic vision or list of stretch goals, and then mandating their achievement ‘somehow’, while abdicating responsibility for designing a credible implementation scheme – as long as you skip on to the next job before the reckoning. (Some people you can read about in the newspapers have ended up running public companies and even countries this way.)

Setting those more extreme examples to the side, how often do you see strategic plans comprising a ‘compelling vision’ and a huge raft of apparently corresponding KPIs, but no real link between them? They are like sandwiches without any jam.

Vision is vital, or else you just get uninspired, incremental ­strategies that are warmed over versions of what you said you’d do last year. But visions are not achieved ‘somehow’.

Michelin’s ‘Responsabilisation’ programme

The tyre manufacturer Michelin traditionally had an ethos of empowerment. But in the early 2000s it embraced the trend for the KPI-heavy centralised management systems being promulgated by large management consultancies. The growth of these approaches has been driven by the tendency to think of organisations ­mechanistically – they are looked at as if they are computers, and the humans working in them as if they are processing units. The problem for Michelin was that obsessing over top-down KPIs was stifling initiative and creativity. (Michelin’s experience is far from unique. In another well-publicised example, 3M found its famously innovative culture undermined by the uber-standardisation of Six Sigma, and in Britain, the New Public Management movement created a backlash, as ‘gaming’ of KPIs produced unintended negative consequences.)

Managers at Michelin resolved to do something radically different to the KPI-heavy trend. Under the leadership of Jean-Dominique Senard, its CEO from 2012 to 2019, and continuing today, the company has dramatically increased the autonomy of frontline workers in a programme it calls Responsabilisation.1

Starting with experiments in a restricted number of plants, team leaders asked workers questions such as:

Typical areas identified have included shift scheduling, and as ­people have gained more experience, aspects of production ­planning. Workers were given responsibility to run and improve these areas. The teams work within a framework, which includes the vision and values of the group and the behaviour expected of Michelin staff, as well as hard constraints such as availability of resources, along with legal and safety rules. They are also given support with resources and skills, and then given wide latitude to achieve results. Teams evaluate their own performance and liaise with other autonomous teams in the factory.

Team leaders are encouraged to step back and shift their role from ‘deciding’ to ‘enabling’. They now act as coaches or, in the event of a disagreement, referees. As lessons have been learned, they have been spread around the company. Michelin estimates that the programme has added half a billion dollars’ worth of improvements, and has created a culture of greater trust and commitment providing a platform for further gains.

Preserving the leader’s intent

How does a leader ensure that their intent is preserved, while ­allowing their people the leeway necessary to enable them to achieve that intent? The most challenging arena for testing answers to this question is the military realm, and so this is a good place to look for ­solutions. And indeed people have always looked to military models of organisation for management ideas. However, there has been a huge shift in thinking about military organisation that is not ­necessarily reflected in the structures and practices of many businesses.

Many people in corporations have an outmoded idea of what today’s military strategists regard as effective methods of command. The traditional hierarchical view of command and control sees orders cascading down a chain of middle management from the top. It reached its zenith in the Pyrrhic waste of WW1 attrition warfare – hardly an ennobling model for efficient deployment of resources in a fast-changing environment.

As they say in the military: ‘No plan survives first contact.’ People on the ground need to make decisions according to the circumstances of the moment, rather than being constrained by robotic scripts and fixed procedures like so many hapless call centre ­operators. As we’ve seen, a Mars Rover, which is a real robot, has to be given enough autonomy and trust to make steering decisions when it starts roving on the planet.

Colonel Boyd and ‘The Mission Contract’

We first met the influential strategist, USAF Colonel and fighter ace John R. Boyd in Chapter 8. Boyd noted that throughout history smaller military organisations have been able to prevail over larger and stronger opponents when they found ways to preserve the ­commander’s intent while devolving as much tactical decision-making as possible to the people at the sharp end of any action.

Beyond his influence in the military sphere, Boyd’s work has influenced a number of business thinkers, notably Tom Peters. Boyd himself was an enthusiastic student of the Toyota Production System, which he saw as an (independently developed) business example of the same principles underlying his own theory. Promotion of Boyd’s work is continued by his acolytes, and the leading figure in the translation of his ideas into the business world is Chet Richards, who among other concepts discusses the mission contract, an invaluable framework for delegation-
without-abdication.

A mission contract involves an explicit transfer of ownership of responsibility for results. Here is a template for delegating by negotiating a mission contract, with acknowledgement to the ­influence of Colonel Boyd and Dr Richards. I’ve used this template very ­successfully with coaching clients, both new leaders fighting a tendency to micromanage and experienced ones swamped by the attempts of their reports to ‘delegate upwards’.

REWARDS format for mission delegation

If leaders can’t delegate a job to someone else and get it returned to a required standard, then they can’t build leverage. Without leverage, productive capacity is going to be limited by the number of hours a leader can work personally.

In the words of General George Patton: ‘Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.’ As well as benefiting from their ingenuity, there’s another plus: if you are too specific about the route to achieving a goal and there turn out to be unforeseen roadblocks, some subordinates will give up and dump it back at your door: ‘You told me to go this way, and it didn’t work, so I give up – over to you.’ If you have specified the destination, not the route, then the onus remains on them to find their way – it’s reasonable for them to consult with you and request extra help, but not to give up.

Here’s a format that works very well, based on the British Army’s ‘Mission Command’ process. I came up with the mnemonic ‘REWARDS’ to make it easy to remember:

R esults required

E vidence for success

W hy is the result important?

A gree to make a contract

R esources and support negotiation

D ocument the agreement

S upport the delegate

Here are the steps in more detail:

Set ‘impossible but fun’ challenges

Don’t misinterpret my railing against Somehow Management to be counselling a lack of ambition. It makes sense to challenge people so that their ingenuity is released. We just don’t want to then leave them high and dry. Somehow Management doesn’t give them a context in which they can succeed. We want to create the context. A great way to do that is the ‘impossible but fun’ challenge. Rather than trying to reach some idea goal for evermore, what if you just tried to achieve the standard for one day, or one week?2

Here’s the sort of situation that’s great for an impossible but fun challenge. You want to achieve some ambitious daily, weekly or monthly performance level in some area of the business. It could be anything: zero defects, 100% schedule attainment, response to ­client enquiries within a certain time, quotes out within a certain time, or zero unsafe acts. Everyone acknowledges the importance of the goal, but in practice it is rarely if ever met, and if people were honest, they’d admit that they just can’t see how to do it.

The idea of meeting such standards day in and day out can seem insurmountable if it’s never been achieved before. But what if you made a game out of it?

In one manufacturing plant, Tom, the factory manager, was ­struggling with a common issue. When they were under time pressure to meet delivery promises people rushed, and quality suffered.

To address it, I suggested Tom organise a ‘model day’ experiment. He selected a day that was two weeks ahead and attached a simple goal to it: For one day, meet the aggressive schedule with zero defects. See if we can do it, and discover what we can learn from trying.

The exercise was a great success. As Tom explained:

‘I used the REWARDS delegation format to brief everybody on what we were going to do (see Figure 12.1).

We actually tried it on two lines on two different days. We started by picking straight runs with no changeovers so that we had a good chance of success. It was great that everybody who was on the factory floor that day had a go – everybody rotated in and out of those lines. And at the end of the day they were running over to the whiteboards to find out: “Did we do it?”

It engaged people. Especially when I explained the “Whys”: a lot of people had never been talked to like that. Previously, the attitude was: “If we don’t get it done – oh well.” They didn’t understand the consequences. They appreciated having an explanation, and they appreciated knowing the results. Now I am picking lines with changeovers to make it more of a challenge, and we’re going to make a video documentary so we can show it to teams in other plants.’

To set your own ‘impossible but fun’ challenge, follow these steps:

An App in a day!

Businesses large and small are having to get to grips with digitalisation. Deutsche Bank became very conscious that if digital transformation was to meet the real needs of customers and employees, it couldn’t just be seen as the sole province of technologists. It’s easy in any organisation for people to develop silo mindsets, but for digital transformation to really work, people from across the business need opportunities to participate in and contribute to areas that they may have shied away from in the past.

Deutsche Bank organised a 24-hour Hackathon in which small, multi-disciplinary teams competed to produce apps for the charity Autistica. The teams included not only technologists but people from around the business: trading, HR, legal, compliance etc. The winning app included an emotion diary to help young people with autism to understand and manage anxiety.

The bank followed the success of the Autistica Hackathon with a similar event for Cure Leukemia. The winning team developed a prototype app that suggests ‘buddies’ with similar diagnoses, age and gender. It also curates articles from trusted sources and keeps track of a patient’s well-being and key statistics. Patients can choose to share this information with friends, family, buddies or doctors, as well as fetch blood test results and report their daily progress.

In addition to the intrinsic value of helping these great causes, there have been business benefits for the bank too. These include connecting people who wouldn’t otherwise work together, underlining the value of being a DB employee – important for satisfaction and ­retention – and most importantly, broadening people’s horisons, particularly by exposing them to digital technologies and methods such as Agile, which they are now applying to their own disciplines, e.g. HR.

Getting diverse teams together to work on a short-term, high-impact project for a meaningful cause provides a great way to develop your organisation’s learning capacity, build relationships across the company and start to mitigate the effects of organisational silos. It is also a far more ‘real’ and lasting morale booster than can ever be provided by empty ‘jollies’ or motivational trainers.

Delegation and Motivation

The idea of giving control to get control relies on a different view of ‘motivation’ than the traditional one popular in leadership ­training. In short, I start from the position that you can’t motivate people. That’s because, in essence, they are already motivated. This goes for employees, peers, customers, and in fact for all human beings (and other living creatures).

Think of the laziest person you know. From one perspective they are solid blocks of inertia. But from another – more useful – one, they are highly motivated.

By what? By the desire to avoid hassle and discomfort, and to seek comfort and ease. If you want proof, try to get them to do something they don’t want to do, and you will be met with energetic counter-manoeuvres! Once their desired conditions are restored, of course, they will return to their inactivity (until you next disturb them).

It’s like a thermostat. If the room is the right temperature, a thermostat doesn’t do anything. But if the temperature goes above the required setting, it will turn on the air conditioning straightaway. If you want a higher temperature, it’s no use turning on a separate heater, because the thermostat will cancel it out. You need to reset the thermostat itself.

This view makes sense of so much of the endless debates about whether money is a motivator or not. To seek a general answer is to ask the wrong question. Some people are seeking money, others are not. If someone has insufficient funds according to the setting of their ‘money-thermostat’, the offer of more will appear to motivate them. But once they have enough, they will back off, and providing more money will just make your business poorer.

This is also the mechanism underpinning so much ‘resistance’ to change. If you want to get someone to go along with your initiative, then if you try to force them, pump them up, energise them or cajole them, you will essentially be trying to disturb them into it. That’s where the pushback comes from. Instead, figure out their desired conditions and arrange for them to get what they want by doing what you want.

The best regulation is self-regulation

If you want to ensure that something gets done, the best way is to tap into people’s pre-existing motivations. For example:

Concluding Thought: Helping hard-nosed Managers

I advocate working with the natural dynamics of your organisation, and the natural inclinations of your people, as much as possible. Many leaders find this proposal extremely inspiring – it’s great to realise that you can be more effective without having to put in all the energy yourself.

However, some otherwise excellent managers seem to find this kind of approach naïve and touchy-feely. I find they need help in being able to relax their grip. Reminding them of some of this chapters’ key examples makes a big difference in helping them to try something new. In particular I point out that:

Underpinning the idea of giving control to get control is the whole idea that people are ‘pre-loaded’ with motivation. A practical upshot is a new view of resistance to change and the growth-sapping drag it creates: managers are generally active contributors to resistance. And that means that they can change it.