2.3.4.4 Enabling Personal Responsibility
It may occur that employees reject the freedom of choice and responsibility and
avoid decision-making situations because they are not ready to pay the price of the
possibility of failure. Rather they run to their boss and let them make the decision.
Then it is upon the leader to refuse to make the decision and return it to the emplo-
yees because otherwise he or she would be doing their job. The leader can and
should support the employee in choosing by considering options and consequences
together and by giving them courage to risk something, by taking away their fear of
making mistakes and making it clear that they are capable of solving the problem.
But he or she does not give advice (or only in exceptional cases), directions or
protect the employee – this is personal responsibility.
Even if malevolent employees, colleagues or the manager’s superiors accuse
him or her of not providing forceful leadership in this situation: letting go is not
faltering but a reliance on the personal responsibility of the employee. They alone
are responsible for the job they took over. They must decide how it is done and what
they need in order to do so. They must make decisions and bear the consequences.
The manager must learn to resist the temptation to always play the heroic savior for
his or her subordinates. To use Sprenger’s metaphor, the manager can show them
where the tongs and the gloves hang, but it is up to the employee to pull the coals
out of the fire.
A manager must ask their employees to abandon their dependence. It is not the
responsibility of the leader to know more than the staff or to have the answer to
every problem. The superior’s core duty is to invite employees to (re-) activate their
independent abilities. Errors may and will happen. Without errors there can be no
growth, and some of the greatest inventions have been “errors” or waste products.
Executives must create a mistake-friendly climate and must not punish defeats but
sympathetically consider them learning opportunities. The fear of making mistakes
hampers problem-solving skills. Not the mistake is the problem, but the hiding of
mistakes – which is also and especially true for leaders.
Motivation and commitment stem from the harmony between people who are
doing something together, who are moving together towards a goal, and who see
each other as cooperation partners. This relationship is destroyed by criticism.
Criticism is destructive and harmful because it suggests that one knows the truth
while the other is wrong. Criticism condemns and degrades others because it
requires change from them, and because the way the person is, is considered wrong.
Therefore, the person criticized will totally reject the criticism and by all means
(at least inwardly) rebuild their own self-esteem by degrading the person who
criticized them, shoving away their own responsibility in the process. With criti-
cism, leaders only reinforce the behavior criticized.
Feedback on the other hand leaves the other person the choice of accepting what
they hear. It provides them with information they previously did not have; it opens a
different perspective that makes no claims to being perfectly correct. It thus reduces
the “blind spot” in the self-image of the recipient and is an opportunity to learn.
104 2 Occupation or Calling: What Makes for Good Leadership?