Truth 33. You lead better when you get off your pedestal

Depending on when you started your career, you might be more familiar with the old ideas of what managing people is all about: Top down. Command/control. Do as I say, not as I do. Yours is not to question why, yours is to do your job or lose it.

That kind of hierarchical control approach to drawing great work from employees might have worked in the past, but it belongs in the past. You may still find employees willing to slog under such a heavy hand of management, but the really great talent knows better. To keep them on your team, it’s time to evolve your own management style.

“Any behaviors that looks like they’re hierarchically driven, where you as the manager behave as a broker of information and power, those behaviors should simply be gone,” says Craig Ramsay, managing director of the San Francisco Bay office of Sirota Survey Intelligence.

“Managing today means involving and including employees where you might not have ordinarily done it in previous years. It means sharing your responsibilities with them and challenging them to step up and take more on both individually and as a team.”

As you consider what behaviors you want to brand your leadership style, you must ask yourself how willing you are to share your managerial power with your entire team. After you honestly answer that (and assuming that you do want to share power), you’ll want to do the following:

• Treat people the way you want to be treated. You may be a manager, but you’re probably also managed by someone higher up the org chart. Exactly how do you want to be treated by your superiors? In what precise ways do you expect the operating values of your company to play out in your executive group’s behaviors? How does it feel to you personally when they fall short of those expectations? Identify what those behaviors are and model them yourself. Don’t wait for an official decree to come down from the C-suite.

• Create your own team employee value proposition. Many companies that are seriously invested in cultivating an engagement culture take the time to create what’s known as an employee value proposition. This is a set of promises to employees about how they can expect to be treated on the job. If your company doesn’t have one, create a team value proposition—as a team project. As a group, decide exactly what your team members can promise each other in terms of kindness and respect, truth, free sharing of knowledge, and so on.

• Be willing to show your own vulnerability. You’re experiencing some fears and concerns of your own about the direction of the business, your marketplace, even about yourself. Your team expects you to share what’s on your mind. Showing your vulnerability creates a more humanizing environment that allows your employees to share their own concerns—and even ask each other for help.

• Know your people as individuals. It’s not your leadership style that should dictate how you behave with your employees. It’s how you fulfill their needs from you as their team leader that will make the difference in your effectiveness. Each employee has a different need and expectation. And each one has a different comfort zone in terms of how he relates to the power structure. Some don’t especially want to see you wringing your hands in indecisiveness. They want a stronger leader. Others aren’t impressed by your title or position; they want you to be their collaborator. Your interaction with each one should reflect the fact that you understand your employees as individuals—and that you respect them as individuals. Just as much as you hope they respect you.

• Let people know where they stand. Set clear and reasonable goals for your team. Make sure your employees know in real time how their performance is measuring up to not only your expectations but also those of their coworkers. Drive the feedback power throughout your team. Don’t just bear the burden yourself. Take advantage of mechanisms such as social media, texting, and online meeting services to help your employees tell each other how things are going. Keep in mind that younger employees might be actively interested in more frequent feedback, as well as more frequently updated career path planning. But don’t assume that your older workers want annual reviews only.

• Spread the power throughout the team. When you step down from the managerial pedestal, you allow team cohesiveness to truly set in. They will learn to rely on each other. Your goal as an engaging manager is to share accountability and drive managerial responsibilities throughout the group. Give your team the chance to identify and set the goals they need to meet to achieve corporate objectives.

When the time comes to take your team success stories up the org chart so that the rest of the company can model your example, don’t tell the story yourself. Give that honor to your employees.