Command and Control Leaders Are the Ones Fearing You’re Slacking

The business world is often times divided between “us” and “them”. There’s the “us” versus “them” where “us” is the employees and “them” is the organisation, but then there’s a more insidious and even more damaging type of “us” versus “them” and that’s where the “us” is still the employees but the “them” is “management”/“leadership”/“the bosses”. Needless to say that the divide hurts the bottom line. The only structures that can deliver on the business imperatives we have today are highly collaborative and have healthy group dynamics and a strong sense of shared purpose aka - teams. Teams by definition can not bare division.

This antiquated need for hierarchy and the resulting command and control goes unquestioned in far too many organisations today and yet many still scratch their heads as to why they aren’t able to keep up with human-centred competitors since they emulate all of their PR bytes on empowered and engaged workforce when they have done nothing to alter the mindset of old-school management styles.

The Microsoft-found glaring difference in perception we witnessed last week where employees believe -or arguably “know”- they are more productive and work harder when working from home whereas their bosses believe the opposite, is the clearest demonstration of the ubiquitous nature of command and control we’ve ever had of late. That is the root cause of the complete breakdown in trust that sets up the two sides in opposite positions. If employees and employers would have worked together as a genuine team there would have never been space for this level of fundamental mistrust.

Here we are trying to get enterprises to reward their people for the work they do for them that they don’t even acknowledge when we operate in a world where the organisation doesn’t even believe they do the work they have employed them to do.

And here we are talking about new ways of work and a new era of collaboration when programs to undertake systemic mindset change for middle managers to transform into genuine leaders are absent.