A few years ago, I worked with several managers who adamantly believed that it was necessary to closely monitor and control their team members because they believed the employees would fool around if management wasn’t watching. Their belief was understandable. After all, most of their employees were unmotivated and meeting only basic requirements of the job, so managers felt they had to push.
But was the employees’ lack of motivation simply part of their nature? Or was it perhaps a reaction to their managers’ efforts to control them? This gets at one of the most important distinctions between leadership styles, which is often described as “Theory X” vs. “Theory Y,” terminology coined by MIT’s Douglas MacGregor in the 1950s.
Here’s a quick summary:
- Theory X: Managers who ascribe to Theory X believe that their job is to “make team members do the work” and assume that people will fool around if management isn’t pushing and monitoring them all the time.
- Theory Y: Practitioners of Theory Y start with the assumption that most employees want to do a good job and will thrive if given proper support, guidance, training, and empowerment.
Die-hard practitioners of both Theory X and Theory Y believe their approach is right because of their lived experience. That’s because both approaches get the results they expect. Employees managed via Theory X usually resent being controlled, pushed, and micromanaged. They may comply with orders but are unlikely to use much initiative or discretionary energy in their work. Employees led with a Theory Y approach are much more likely to use initiative and be highly motivated at work because Theory Y taps into their intrinsic motivation.
To be fair, I doubt many managers deliberately start out as proponents of Theory X. They may start using it early in their careers as managers because it’s the only approach they have seen. Or they may think it’s what a manager is supposed to do based on societal stereotypes of managers. So it essentially starts out as an unexamined belief. But by pushing and controlling, they inevitably get resistance from team members, which reinforces the sense that they need to push people to get the work done.
As a practitioner of Theory Y, I have found teams can accomplish amazing things when they feel empowered and have opportunities to grow and contribute their ideas.
Our behaviors as leaders have an enormous impact on our team members, and our behaviors flow from our beliefs -- whether those beliefs are deeply held or mostly unexamined. Consequently, it is important to think through our leadership beliefs and achieve clarity on the kind of leader we each want to be. That clarity can remind us to stay in alignment with our values and alert us when we may be considering the wrong path.
I developed the following list of leadership beliefs during my decades as a leader in government. These beliefs helped me stay focused on what I felt were the two most important things: the mission and our people.
What I Believe as a Leader
- I believe that our work in government is important. The work is done by our people. We need to get it right, and our people should be able to love coming to work every day.
- I believe that leadership is about people. We need to focus on our people, engage with them, and learn their talents and aspirations.
- I believe most employees want to do a good job. As leaders, we need to give each individual the support, encouragement, guidance, and information they need to do their best.
- I believe every person deserves to be treated with respect and dignity.
- I believe trust is the foundation of leadership. Without trust, there is no team.
- I believe we all have the capacity to learn and grow. We should all challenge ourselves to continuously improve.
- I believe that everyone has ideas for making the operation better, whether that be making better decisions, improving service, using our resources more efficiently, or creating a better work climate. We need to capture and implement as many good ideas as we can.
- I believe fear is a cancer in any organization. When fear is present, people do not feel free to speak up, organizational performance suffers, and the climate becomes toxic.
- I believe that candor is like oxygen for an organization. When we can speak openly about the real issues impacting the team, we can address them and then move on to accomplishing the mission as a team.
- I believe feedback is a gift. It’s hard to get feedback as you move up in the organization. If you think I’m going off the rails, please help me do better.
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