Oldies but goldies. It is a bit cliche to say that everything was better before. But sometimes it is good to go back to get perspective to existing issues and matters. I have been thinking motivation and commitment a lot lately. How to get myself motivated and how to get others motivated? How increase commitment of people to their tasks? Most likely very common thoughts if you are working in supervisor role.
These thoughts dropped me back late 90's while I was just graduated from university head full of great theories and new skills. I joined Nokia Mobile Phones at that time as a programmer in a team implementing GSM high speed data transmission services. Technology was pretty new and there were no clear understanding what is all about and how it should be implemented. We pretty much jumped into deep without knowing where and started to make trials and increasing our knowledge level. Have to say those days were full of innovation. There were no right or wrong decisions, no good or bad trials. There were only actions towards common target known by everyone. That target was achieved successfully, we implement high speed data transmission for Nokia mobile devices.
So what? As I analyse the time almost 20 years ago I like to highlight the main success factors from my point of view. The first thing is the attitude of management. They were honest and open with their knowledge base. They did have guts to say that they do not know how to do it but they trust we can do it. They gave us a frame within we were allowed to work and they did not took part to actions happened inside the frame. The second thing to point out is innovation. As I mentioned there were no good or bad trials. There were number of different trials made by the team and all those gave something to the final product. We had a freedom to try and fail on our journey. The third thing is the use of peoples potential. Everyone had a significant role and everyone was having right match between skills and tasks. All of this can be summaries by saying that success of the team was based on trust without controlling.
Trust and control, good and bad? Not exactly. Every organization needs reasonable amount of control. Controlling is needed for target setting and giving frames within to work for. But what happens inside the frame should be based on trust. If controlling happens also inside the frame we are talking about micromanagement. The message what micromanagement gives to employees is that they don't have motivation, they do not have skills, they are not trusted etc. This leads to situation where people are not using they potential, they are carrying out tasks with minimal effort and they do not feel to be appreciated. Too much control promotes distrust.
Successful leadership is not based on control but it based on leading people's potential. What does it means? It means that leadership is paying attention to the people and their potential and how use it, not just controlling what is done, how it is done and in a worst case dictating how something needs to be done. Understanding the potential of people requires emotional intelligence and skills to see value of people from the organization point of view. Key to make people to use their full potential is trust.
Control based leadership is not working anymore, that is the fact. Army as an organization has always been seen as very controlled and authoritarian environment. But now also in army they have started to look leadership from different perspectives. This can be noticed for example from the article of Finnish military magazine Suomen Sotilas 5/2015. There was an article named same way as this blog "Trust good, control bad" and it handled same topics. The summary was that we need to increase trust and decrease control. And the most important is to take a good of the most precious ones, people.
