“Donde manda capitán, no gobierna marinero.”
Literally translated, it means that “where a captain reigns, a sailor does not” and more loosely translated it means “I don’t know. Ask the captain.” You might hear this cheeky saying when someone asks you a question and you playfully respond to ask the person in charge because you just obey. In Portuguese, a similar saying doesn’t include captains but nonetheless carries a similar meaning – “Manda quem pode, obedece quem tem juÍzo.” Both sayings convey the idea that there are two different types of roles with vastly different responsibilities and power – followers and leaders. The sayings embody a spirit of common sense, a truth universally acknowledged that is best not ignored.
While you can employ these sayings in a variety of settings, I find that these sayings are most relevant in organizations, especially in situations where a “capitán” or a person “quem manda” is the intentional or unintentional gatekeeper for all work carried out by the team. If an employee has “juízo” or common sense, then she knows not to overstep or act above her pay grade. As a result, ‘followers’ become increasingly more dependent on their leader for approvals and direction. This often translates into more meetings, additional processes, and constant rework – slowing the team down, lowering morale, and overwhelming the leader with everyday minutiae. Sound familiar?
The Proactivity Problem
While there are many factors that contribute to this dynamic (and indeed no one root cause!), one of the most commonly cited reasons by leaders is that the team is just not proactive. If the team were more proactive, then the leader would give more responsibility and authority to the team. In fact, the leader may even desire to give the team more responsibility but the team needs to change their behavior first. In other words, the emphasis is on the individual, rather than the ways that the individual interacts with their environment or how the leader may be contributing to the perceived lack of “proactivity.”
The relationship between proactivity and delegation can be represented by the causal loop diagram below. Simply put – the less proactive a team is, the less likely a leader is to delegate tasks and authority over those tasks and vice versa.
As the diagram shows, characterizing the problem as a proactivity problem does not reveal great wealth of information. If anything, it provokes more questions, such as:
What does proactivity look like?
What does delegation look like?
What underlying needs, biases, or fears might be driving a leader’s concern with proactivity?
What do the leader and team really want?
All the more reason, therefore, to move beyond proactivity and dig a little deeper.
Digging Deeper into Proactivity
What if we could peel back the layer just slightly? What if you could take a snapshot of what happens in a team? Imagine you were taking a picture with your camera. The diagram below illustrates one possible scenario out of countless possibilities:
The diagram shows the following:
The more inbound requests a leader receives, the greater their workload becomes.
The greater the leader’s workload, the more the team depends on the leader to initiate tasks.
The more the team depends on the leader, the less possible it feels to assign the team a task, which results in fewer tasks completed by the team.
The fewer tasks the team is given, the fewer opportunities they have to learn new tasks, which further impacts what work they can complete.
All of this, in turn, increases the leader’s workload and the cycle reinforces itself.
By getting more specific, we can begin to observe some of the interactions that sustain the current dynamic. A closer look reveals that, despite individual motivation, there are structures, policies, and processes in place that reinforce a system where the team remains overly dependent on their leader. If the team, for example, has no line of sight into the requests that come into the department, waits on the leader for work assignments, and most likely, has little authority to carry out the work in a way other than the leader’s preference, then the team and the leader are both stepping into and reinforcing a system that concentrates power in the leader. Put another way – the system is perfectly designed for the results it is getting.
To get different results, we need to experiment with the design. To that end, the diagram can not only be a helpful tool to reveal the current state but envision multiple futures for the team. The diagram above invites some of the following questions that can begin to change the way things have always been done:
What might be possible if the inbound requests did not solely lie with the leader?
What might be possible if the leader had regular feedback rhythms with the team to support team learning (not to mention, feedback more helpful than “you need to be proactive”)?
What if the team co-created criteria for when to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a request?
What meetings or tools could support both sync and async collaboration among the team?
By getting more specific and taking a picture of what we are observing, we can identify ways we can nudge the system – knowing that each time we try something, we will learn more about the nature of the problem and what we can try next.
Transforming Systems
“Donde manda capitán, no gobierna marinero” is a playful saying that does not need to govern how leaders interact with their teams. As leaders take the time to observe their environment, interrogate platitudes like ‘proactivity,’ and stay cognizant of their social identities, they can begin to transform how they work with their team.
Next time you find yourself wondering why someone is not more proactive, reliable, or mature so you can delegate more work, pause and imagine taking a picture of the scene. What exactly would you be observing in that still image? What is contributing to what you are observing? Then, share your observations with your team, not with the intent of finding a single root cause but to enrich your understanding and identify potential starting points for change.
Transforming systems is not the result of a leader’s herculean effort. Together with their team, they can change the way things have always been done, one experiment at a time.