The world is awash with leadership advice, and research from countless business schools and consultants frequently lists out the key characteristics of good leaders. These tend to fall into two categories, the ‘lead yourself, lead your team, lead your organization’ approach, and then the long list of ‘set clear objectives, communicate well, build trust, be adaptable, empower your team….’ to-do lists. Neither of these approaches is wrong but both fall foul of the tendency leadership developers have which is believing most people roll out of bed in the morning thinking ‘I’m a leader, so what must I do to lead today?’

The truth is most of us do not envision ourselves as leaders, but rather as doctors, bankers, nurses, publishers, engineers, marketers, or whatever we may be and we start our days checking off the things left undone from yesterday that still need to be done and prioritizing the ‘to do’ list of things to be done today to allow normal service to continue. We have very little time to reflect calmly on our leadership style and actions.

The leader’s responsibility is to assess risk and empower people to make decisions as far down the hierarchy as possible

Leadership programs are highly valuable in that they create space in frantic schedules where this reflection can be achieved, but they too suffer from the downside of all formal classroom learning the severe limitation of what we can remember. The German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus described his ‘forgetting curve’ in the 1870s, and our brains have evolved very little since then our ability to retain new information, without a simultaneous emotional experience to embed it, is very limited. So trying to check off those lists or explore your leadership self, team, and organization a week after the program has finished is always going to be a challenge.

There is a further wrinkle in this process too. Much of the advice we give would-be leaders is along the lines of ‘build trust’, ‘empower others’, and ‘create empathy’. Trust, empowerment, and empathy are all excellent things for a leader to have, but they are not simple to acquire. Indeed, ‘trust’ is a ‘gift word’, it is something bestowed on us by others, not something we can acquire ourselves in any direct way.

These barriers go some way towards explaining why, although we know what good leadership looks like, the leadership development sector continues to struggle to develop consistently good leaders. The space to practice leadership skills is very limited, our ability to remember what those skills are is severely restricted, and the process of translating what we know to be good practice into practice is not easy.

Having spent the last decade exploring and reviewing leadership development initiatives at top business schools and in large organizations around the world, it becomes ever clearer that what is required is not those ‘to-do’ lists of good leadership behaviors and practices but getting people to buy into a new leadership mindset that is clear and simple.

Research shows that in the vast majority of situations, happy people are productive people; so ensuring your staff are enjoying what they do is important. A very good way to stop people from being happy is to reduce their control and responsibility. As Columbia professor Gita Johar has highlighted, the need for control is a basic human desire, and when it is removed either explicitly or implicitly, we lose something, call it energy, enthusiasm, or engagement.

This observation lies at the heart of good leadership. As noted, good leaders have many skills, but ultimately they get people to achieve desired outcomes. In the high-velocity, complex business environment we now have to work in no one can understand all the details and know all the facts that are emerging and evolving across our workplaces. It is therefore necessary for everyone at every level to devolve decision-making to the lowest level they dare to. This is the leader’s responsibility to assess downside risk and empower people to make decisions as far down the hierarchy as possible.

By removing fear from the workplace, extraordinary things can happen. Applied neuroscientist, Professor Paul Brown, writes extensively on this in his book The Fear-free Organization. Initially, just giving people the ability to make decisions is great for morale, it then leads to new ideas and concepts emerging, so procedures can improve and innovation occurs. For these things to happen, I am not advocating unilateral changes by lots of individuals that way chaos and anarchy lie. Changes have to be discussed and collaborative. But they do not necessarily need to be approved and endorsed from above on every occasion. It is the leader’s role to be the architect of their working environments to enable people to feel comfortable taking responsibility and control.

In a work environment where people are constantly changing jobs and taking on different and varied roles, the old ‘work contract’ of following the rules and keeping your head down, and in return, you end up with a stable job and valuable pension no longer applies. Work is less certain and pensions are more flexible (and less valuable) so different motivators need to be offered to keep people willing to give their knowledge and labor in return for employment. Today these motivators are much more likely to be intrinsic ones such as purpose and well-being, than purely extrinsic ‘pay and promotion’ ones.

I call this the Risk & Permission approach to leadership. The overriding imperative all leaders should have is to devolve decision processes as far down the hierarchy as they feel they can. This requires the leader to assess the responsibility risk: does this level of staff have sufficient access to information to make an informed decision? Do they have enough experience to make a sensible judgment call? What might the consequences of a poor decision be? Am I prepared to take that risk?

If the answers to the Risk questions are all positive, then it is the leader’s task to grant permission to those people to take on the responsibility. This Permission granting ideally should be as explicit as possible: “Don’t ask me, you decide”, “you have enough information to make that call yourself, have a think about it and let me know what you decide”, “discuss it with the team, and do what you think best.”

The vast majority of decisions we have to make are not mission-critical. The failures we often encounter come from indecision rather than wrong ones. Most choices can be iterated and adapted once they are made so if they are sub-optimal ones they can be improved later on.

The Risk & Permission approach is flexible, the leader whilst empowering their followers must always retain the ability to withdraw permission or over-rule. It is important as a leader, that you have ‘skin in the game’, if it goes wrong you remain responsible, therefore you must be able to step in and change things if you perceive the risk as becoming too great. There are many situations, especially in high-risk, zero-tolerance sectors such as healthcare, where changing work processes cannot be allowed without significant high-level approval Risk & Permission allows for leaders to maintain this, but also allows them to identify those areas where that level of restriction is not required.

By limiting your core leadership skills to just assessing risk and granting (or declining) permission, you set off a domino-like series of other actions. By empowering others, you are trusting them and in return, you will be trusted. It requires you to set clear goals and objectives otherwise people cannot know what their aim is. You will improve their levels of engagement and by being more engaged they will likely be more adaptive and innovative, and so more productive. Empowered teams tend to be more cohesive and collaborative ones too.

The further advantage of pushing decision-making down the line, rather than up it as is more traditional, is that it encourages you to ensure that the correct skills have been developed to allow permission to be given. Today’s managers have tended to lose the ability to encourage and develop others. The old Master-Apprentice relationship is making a return, but it can surely happen faster.

The irony of devolving decision-making away from yourself to others is that with greater trust gifted to you, greater influence will accrete to you too. You will also, if you are doing it well, discover that you have more time for other tasks if much of your previous role has been devolved. I look forward to a time when the sign of a good leader is not how many decisions they have to make but how few.