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Center for Enlightened Leadership
 
THE LENS E-NEWSLETTER/JOURNAL

Making the Sum Greater Than the Parts
By PAUL D. HOUSTON

  Dr. Paul. D. Houston
  Dr. Paul D. Houston
Founding Partner

In my first superintendent position, I had my administrative team go on a short retreat before the school year started. We had a “process” consultant working with us. She asked us to do a simple exercise. First she gave us a short reading assignment. When we had finished, she gave us a list of questions about the reading to answer individually. When we had finished that, she put us into groups and again asked the groups to answer the questions. Of course there was a lot of give and take as each of us defended our answers. But soon we found compromise and turned in a group answer sheet. She scored each of the individual sheets and then the group sheets. In every case, the group scored higher than the highest-scoring member of the group. Our power as a group was much greater than the power of even the smartest among us. It was a tremendous lesson in why organizations must collaborate and cooperate to get work done. It is simply better when you do.

But this was also a great lesson in what I think is the core of leadership: the ability to empower and uplift those around you. When leaders learn to invest themselves in how those around them do, then those around them will rise to the occasion. As a leader, I was sometimes criticized by my board, or even by members of the community, because I invested so much trust in those who worked around me. Some could not understand how I could trust people to do their work without a lot of oversight. Quite simply, my experience has been that when you empower others, most of the time they will not disappoint you. (That implies that sometimes they do, and that is true.) But if you win 70 or 80% of the time, you’re way ahead of the game. Baseball players who hit .300 get into the Hall of Fame. An organization that has its people operating on a 70-80% success rate is a Hall of Fame organization. Trusting others is the essence of empowering them.

But what about the times when people fail to make it, when they fail to justify the trust you placed in them? Then you have to forgive them for not doing it right and encourage them to do better next time. The essence of empowering others is trust and forgiveness; the essence of leadership is empowering others. Sometimes members of my staff used to complain that they were working too hard and that I had put too much pressure on them. I would ask them to cite times when I had put such pressure on them. Usually, after some thought, they would acknowledge that I hadn’t really pressured them beyond letting them know how much I respected them and how successful I knew they would be. The pressure they felt was self-inflicted. There really is no greater pressure on us than understanding what greatness lies within us and how much we need to do to reach that potential. So empowering others isn’t just about slapping someone on the back and saying “Good job.” It isn’t about empty gestures. Empowering others is showing a deep-seated belief in their potential greatness and doing all you can to help them reach it.

The first rule of uplifting another person is taking the outside weight off them. Hot air balloons can only fly when they drop their ballast. People can only fly when the outside weights on them are loosened and released. But that clearly doesn’t mean there isn’t any pressure. Just ask those who worked for me. The most empowering, and the most pressure-inducing, thing you can say to someone is, “I believe in you.” People hate to disappoint others. The worst thing others have said to me is that I disappointed them. If they were someone I cared about, that was both crushing and inspiring. I knew I had let them down, but I also knew they believed I could do so much better—and I knew they were right. And I would try to step up my game.

Sometimes we have to help others see what is inside them. Life can push people down to the point that they forget their own power. A wise leader helps people remember and sets them on their way. When they begin to get a sense of what they might do, then shower them with belief. Belief is the fuel of greatness.

Once when I was a young principal I had a meeting with my superintendent at the same time that a very important planning meeting was taking place back in my school. The first thing he said to me was, “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you back at school running that meeting?” My answer was simple and (I realized many years later) rather profound. I told him I had picked the right people to run the meeting, and I had given them clear expectations for what the outcome should be. They didn’t need me there to run things. While admittedly I was naïve, I was also correct. When the leader creates the right conditions and then empowers those in the organization to get things done, they don’t need hands-on leadership. I have come to believe over time that “micro-managing” is one of the worst sins a leader can commit, and they do it because they don’t trust their people.

One of the teachings of Taoism is that the leader should work in such a way that when the task is achieved the people will say they did it themselves. Empowerment leads to ownership, and ownership leads to success. The way you can create a sum that is greater than the parts is to make sure that each part—in this case, each person—is doing their best. That cumulative effort will exceed anything you might have dreamed. Servant leadership is all about empowering others. And empowering others happens when the leader cares enough to believe in others and risk their failure and then support them through it to achieving ultimate success.

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