Leading When You Don’t Have Control

Today’s Future Here Now does two things:

It introduces you to two newsletters you probably didn’t know about, and you should,

It explores the question of how we lead in a reality where so little is under our direct control.

For most of you, the realization that you’re ostensibly in control, but not actually in control, has already hit you in the face far more than once.

When authority was mostly unquestioned, bosses directly controlled your employment and most people were expected to do what they were told (especially if you were young, female, minority of any type…), that’s when most of the systems that govern our organizations were built. We learned time cards, chain of command, formal and informal pecking orders. And fear — fear that someone farther up the food chain would take something we needed away.

For many of us now, with “ownership” of tasks (assigned by others) and decentralized collaboration teams (set up by others), we’re asked to do much more than we are explicitly told. We’re asked to think, to create, to problem solve — while still on the time strictures, reporting structures, and output expectations that our Industrial Era managers would recognize as their own.

And many of us are given that “ownership” in the face of the fact that important elements, like our job security and our pay and our standing within the system, depend on actors we can’t control — suppliers, funders, and that notorious Public, who feels more empowered to share their beliefs than ever. And the basic systems and structures within which we learned to do our work don’t give us any help in dealing with these outside-the-power-structure Controllers.

So how do we lead in a context where the structures that we used to assume would underpin our ability to lead don’t actually exist?

These articles give us a glimpse of the possible answers.

Chaos can be helpful?

Leaders can generate team creativity and ownership by giving controlled power to their teams to experiment and learn, rather than making top-down decisions that bypass team input. Using the concept of “titrating” power in small doses—like design thinking’s “fail fast and cheap” approach—leaders can let teams navigate chaos within appropriate risk parameters while building buy-in and ownership.

Jeff is right on the money here — experimenting and learning are the name of the game now, otherwise you stagnate and get either attacked or left behind. And I really like the “titrating” idea.

The challenge is that sooooo many of our organizations, local governments, businesses, etc. operate from ground rules and assumptions that actively work against experimenting and risking. Unless we look hard at our most deeply-embedded paradigms, we will only be able to chip at the surface, instead of creating the new solutions we need.

Driving Impact Without Authority?

California’s Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development demonstrated how to lead effectively without formal regulatory power by connecting stakeholders, clarifying rules, and building alignment around shared outcomes—like California’s successful zero-emission vehicle strategy. Key principles include stepping into gaps as a convener, designing backwards from impact, measuring outcomes rather than activities, and maintaining trust through neutrality rather than relying on titles.

We often underestimate the power of convenors. If you have the clout to pull others together and frame up the problem to be addressed, you have an ability to create that exceeds your own limited capability. And neutrality — not having an ulterior motive other than solving the problem — carries a weight that we often underestimate. Looks like a great example of how to lead without being The Leader.

Let it Go…. your Certainty, that is.

Research showing that successful organizations implement hybrid work through four capabilities: using flexibility to attract talent, measuring results over presence, letting teams set their own norms, and investing in infrastructure and manager training. The research confirms that no peer-reviewed evidence supports rigid five-day office mandates, and that effective leadership means moving from measuring compliance and activity to measuring actual outcomes.

Measuring outcomes (the results of what you did) rather than outputs (whether you ticked the box or not) represents one of the most significant improvements we need to make — for businesses, but also for nonprofits and local governments. Increasing complexity and ambiguity means that the outputs we’re accustomed to reporting (X many people showed up) fails to satisfy anyone, because we increasingly understand how little that means. We often say that we don’t measure outcomes because that’s too hard, but what we really mean is, we don’t want to figure out how to do it.