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Have you ever wanted to change how something gets done, but held back because you thought you'd get in trouble?
In a conversation with David MacLennan, CEO of the City of Vincent in Perth, I was reminded of how this type of thinking can hold back both individual and organisational performance:
Me: I suspect for many there's a learned behaviour of “I can't do that. I'll get in trouble for doing that. That's not my lane”. What does it take to shift to a place where people like, well, I have permission?
David: I like the formula from the sports-coaching book about tennis, The Inner Game, by Tim Gallwey: performance equals potential minus interference.
When you remove the interference, performance equals potential.
Interference comes in a few different forms:
Practical: poor equipment, frustrating technology
Structural: rules, processes, organisation design
Psychological: stories, assumptions, belief systems
Interference can accumulate for good reasons. Each rule or process made sense when it was created. These rules pile up into what David calls “pain." And when you have pain, it’s hard to operate at your potential.
Your job as a leader is to be a pain manager.
Early on in his tenure, David asked all staff to rate the effectiveness of their part of the organisation across 25 different dimensions. Staff rated across a one-to-five scale, with lower scores indicating a higher level of interference. The results led to conversations, and those conversations led to empowered decisions that freed up the potential that was sitting there.
We don't grow potential. We release it.
What would happen if you saw your job as removing the pain - the interference - so your people could get on with doing what they were hired to do? They were hired because of their potential. Let them live up to it.
This is facilitative leadership, where you’re being more ‘host’ than ‘hero’. Where a hero adds another program, a host clears what's in the way.
It’s inspiring to hear David talk about releasing potential not just for the people and the organisation he leads, but also for the city he serves. He’s big on empowering ratepayers to make decisions that work for them, rather than having the council be the bottleneck. I suspect his approach is a big contributor to the City of Vincent recently being voted the second most liveable city in Australia.
A question to sit with, and to ask others: what's in the way of you doing your best work today?
Check out the entire podcast conversation with David and I here.
