Workplace Doctor: Unite the team with inclusive approach

Autrocratic manager needs to learn to trust his team to become a collaborative leader.

I manage a team of five and as our company is global, we are all regularly on the road. For this reason I have to trust my staff to be efficient and respond to my requests as most of my management happens virtually. One of the five, however, refuses to follow my orders and is a disruptive member of the team. I have asked for him to be transferred to another department – but what management lessons can I learn from this for the future? TM, Dubai

The first thing I noticed when I read your question was the language you used: you have “staff” rather than a team; you “have to trust” them (shouldn’t that come naturally?) and one of them “refuses to follow my orders”. The overall impression I formed, from this admittedly short exposure to you, is that you may be quite an autocratic manager, a command-and-control type, one who tells people what to do rather than asks them for an opinion, someone who takes dissent of any kind as a challenge to your authority. You may be successful at your job, you may not be – but if my impression is accurate, I for one would not much fancy working for you.

Now, one thing that regular readers may have heard from me before is this: we get the culture we deserve. If you treat people like resources, if you make everything win/lose, if you tell far more than you ask, then you will create a culture full of challenge which feels unsupportive and stressful to those asked to work within it. Many of us, when we are led as if we are children to be disciplined, respond by becoming children who are undisciplined. We become disruptive, manipulative, wilful … and while the team leader blames us for our behaviour, it is of course nothing other than a reaction to how the team leader is treating us.

So, to start with don’t think of yourself as managing a team, but as leading one. Don’t think of having to trust your staff, but think of it as your job to create a culture where your team members can and will trust each other and you, because that is what they feel able to do.

Next, don’t give orders, but share objectives and ask the team members how those objectives can best be met. The team members can and will then see and set their own tasks, which they will then go out and undertake because they are committed to the team meeting its objectives. General George Patton famously said: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what you want them to achieve and they will surprise you with their ingenuity”. There is a lesson there for all of us who are short of time and think the quickest way to get things done is to tell others what to do and how to do it. To those other people, it sounds as if you think they are unwilling to do things, so they have to be bullied into action, and you think they are incapable of doing things, so you have to tell them how to do things. Hands up who wants to work hard for someone who thinks they are both unwilling and incapable?

Your team, if it is to function well as a team, must have common objectives. Otherwise you just have five individuals, each pursuing their own agenda. So ask yourself this: if you got each team member to write down and hand to you the objectives of the team as understood by them how much similarity would you find? Would the five sets of objectives be aligned? Or wildly different? Whose responsibility is it to get that aligned understanding, and to keep it aligned?

Great teams both collaborate well and maintain individual autonomy. Your team needs to do both because it spends little time together. You have to create the togetherness that generates collaboration and you need to instil the confidence that feeds autonomy.

Doctor’s prescription:

There are huge lessons to be learnt from this episode – but if I were to roll them all into one I’d say this: stop being an autocratic manager and start being a collaborative leader.

Roger Delves is the director of the Ashridge Executive Masters in Management and an adjunct professor at the Hult International Business School. He is the co-author of The Top 50 Management Dilemmas: Fast Solutions to Everyday Challenges. Email him at [e-mail] for advice on any work issues

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