The famous and incredibly successful race car driver Mario Andretti once said, “If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.”
Leaders in today’s always-on, racetrack-like, VUCA world simply cannot afford to try to keep everything under control. There’s way too much information coming at us, too many demands on our time, and too many competing priorities. Moreover, the landscape of the world we live in is changing at such a rapid pace that we simply have to get comfortable with less control than ever before. Further, as we advance into more and more leadership responsibility, we have to learn to let go of more and more direct control over any outcomes to maximize our leadership effectiveness.
For many leaders, this is one of the scariest parts of leading in today’s VUCA world. So much is at stake, even potentially our career, yet we can no longer focus on directly controlling the outcomes because the span of our purview is too broad to even attempt that. One of the cruxes of being successful in senior leadership roles today is being able to make this transition successfully – the transition to letting go of direct control.
As important as it is to let go of control, leaders sometimes struggle to recognize their own controlling tendencies. Here are some questions to help you identify any controlling tendencies you might have:
