Freedom is a leadership attitude that opens up new opportunities for employees. The biggest challenge for leadership is to instill the necessary trust in employees. But how does trust enter the system?
The individuality of customers is one of the major paradigms of the digital business world. We have long left behind the early misconception that "the digital customer" would be a uniform model and that the vast variety of needs could be neatly categorized with the help of Big Data. As digitization progresses, our handling of data becomes more differentiated, and so do individual purchasing incentives, communication, and especially service. We have understood: Thanks to digitization, our customers are accustomed to a high degree of individualization - and increasingly demand it offline as well.
CUSTOMER ENTHUSIASM REQUIRES INDIVIDUALITY.
From the customer's perspective, this is the decisive reason why we need new freedoms that emanate from leadership to employees - and from there to customers. Only an empowered employee can inspire customers. Employees need freedoms, that is decision-making and action spaces, to be individually capable of acting towards customers.
MANY LEADERS SUFFER FROM RELATIONSHIP ISSUES
For the Corporate Monkeys who feel comfortable in the corset of dependencies, this is already a tough nut to crack in a systemic sense. They are trained in a leadership model based on instruction and control. However, making employees individually capable of acting means turning a multitude of processes upside down. Courage, a spirit of experimentation, and tolerance for risk are indispensable. There is no secure path to freedom.
BASIC REQUIREMENT OF LEADERSHIP
However, the greater challenge lies in the human aspect of great individualization. Because trust is the basic requirement of leadership that grants employees the necessary freedoms to do their job really well. And trust is something many leaders struggle with. Corporate Monkeys are control freaks who fear nothing more than free radicals within their sphere of influence. Such leaders have relationship issues. And that is a dramatic weakness. Only a leader with strong relationships is able to meet customers and employees of the future on an equal footing, inspire them, empower them, and challenge them. Leadership in the sign of freedom rests on four pillars that together form the foundation of freedom - because they are the foundation of a sustainable relationship. My formula for Leadership is:
V 4 : TRUST, ROLE MODEL, RESPONSIBILITY, COMMITMENT
All four Vs describe the role of the leader. Trust is the big V. The significance of the other three has already been emphasized by Dieter Frey, the head of the Center for Leadership and People Management at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Trust is the emotional basis of the relationship on which the other three Vs thrive. If I want my employees to act voluntarily and autonomously, I can only achieve this by setting an example for them. If I, as a leader, expect my employees to take responsibility for common goals, I have no choice but to show myself as a responsible boss. If I want my employees to feel committed to the company, I can only achieve that by demonstrating to them that I am committed to our mission. The lack of trust is therefore the Achilles' heel of the leadership as we know it. Because a boss who does not trust his employees will have employees who dare nothing. Especially not in relation to the customer.
TAKE THE LEAP, COMO!
Trust is the central lever to give employees freedom. High engagement, high motivation, high morale, high results, high customer orientation: all of this can be achieved through trust in leadership. And trust in leadership only grows when leadership in turn places trust in employees. Leadership is relationship management. COMO, the Corporate Monkey, needs relationship therapy. To learn trust, he needs a sturdy bridge that leads him to his employees and into the new era across the raging river of uncertainties. And we build this bridge by integrating trust into the system so that COMO can grasp it and apply it. So, the big question is: How do we operationalize trust?
TRUST IN ACTION
An impressive example of how it can work is Asana. The web and mobile application forge from San Francisco was founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and engineer Justin Rosenstein. Both were responsible for - attention! - employee productivity at Facebook. Asana, supported by, among others, star investor Peter Thiel, now focuses on software tools that facilitate collaboration among teams - through clarity and transparency in the organization of processes and responsibilities. And this focus is also part of the company itself. In an internal discussion, founder Justin Rosenstein explained the importance of trust in Asana's organizational structure and how it is operationalized. The example shows what freedom can achieve when everyone in the company has the authority to make decisions.
DISTRIBUTED AUTHORITY
Rosenstein calls Asana's leadership model "Distributed Authority". The company is organized around "responsibility areas" instead of traditional departments or project groups within a classic hierarchy. For each responsibility area, there is a "Directly Responsible Individual" who ultimately makes decisions - and can even enforce them against his team members and their managers. And this Directly Responsible Individual is fundamentally responsible for the actual operational work. Not a manager three floors up who is not reliably able to assess the team's challenges or the customers' needs. The reason this system works is the decision-making process: The Directly Responsible Individual collects advice and lets everyone in his team speak. He or she actively incorporates each feedback, explains their considerations to the team, and must earn everyone's trust in their decisions.
TRUSTFUL RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
Rosenstein reports that this level of empowerment initially unsettled some employees because they had to unlearn habits from other leadership systems. There, the goal was to keep managers happy rather than to consider them as resources for their own decisions. And the managers themselves had to learn that they were primarily accountable to their employees, not the other way around. Trust, according to Rosenstein, empowers each individual to gain their own experiences and act quickly. It attracts the best employees because they want to be trusted. And it ensures stable relationships as the company grows and the staff becomes physically dispersed.
TRUST-BUILDING MEASURE
At Asana, trust is not seen as a mood enhancer but as an operational necessity so that everyone can productively utilize their freedoms. Therefore, the Californians have devised ways to create a climate of trust. It includes three measures: • Giving and demanding feedback: Trust means believing that people grow in their jobs - not that they are already perfect. Open, "loving" feedback is the engine of this growth and promotes mutual trust.
