they are the owners of the processes

Most important, the leader of the business and his or her leadership team are deeply engaged in all three [picking other leaders, setting the strategic direction, and conducting operations].  They are the owners of the processes - not the strategic planners or the human resources (HR) or finance staffs. 

Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan 

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan with Charles Burck. 2002. Crown Business, NY, NY. p. 23,24

thinking small: store within a store

I first began thinking about some of the very real ways that we could improve our teamwork and put more authority in the hands of our people in the stores.

Our most famous technique for doing this is a textbook example of thinking small. We call it Store Within a Store, and it's the simplest idea in the world. Again, in many big retail companies the department head is just an hourly employee going through the motions, somebody who punches a clock, then rips open boxes and stacks whatever's in them onto shelves. But we give our department heads the opportunity to become real merchants at a very early stage of the game. They can have the pride of proprietorship even if they weren't fortunate enough to go to college or be formally trained in business. They only have to want it bad enough, pay close attention, and work very hard at developing merchandising skills. We've had many cases where the experience has fired people up with ambition, and they've goin on to work their way through college and move on up in the company, and I hope we have many more cases like that.

Again, this only works because we decided a long time ago to share so much information about the company with our associates, rather than keep everything secretive. In Store Within a Store we make our department heads the managers of their own businesses, and in some cases these businesses are actually bigger in annual sales than a lot of our first Wal-Mart stores were. We share everything with them: the costs of their goods, the freight costs, the profit margins. We let them see how their store ranks with every other store in the company on a constant, running basis, and we give them incentives to want to win.

 

Sam Walton

Sam Walton, Made in America by Sam Walton & John Huey. Bantam Books. 1992. p. 227

commander's intent

From a leader’s perspective, intent is the starting point. “Commander’s intent” has a special meaning in the military that requires time and thought. A commander must state his relevant aim. Intent is a formal statement in which the commander puts himself or herself on the line. Intent must accomplish the mission, it has to be achievable, it must be clearly understood, and at the end of the day, it has to deliver what the unit was tasked with achieving. Your moral authority as a commander is heavily dependent on the quality of this guidance and your troops’ sense of confidence in it: the expectation that they will use their initiative, aligning subordinate actions. You must unleash initiative rather than suffocate it…

By conveying my intent in writing and in person, I was out to win their coequal “ownership” of the mission: it wasn’t my mission; rather from private through general, it was our mission. I stressed to my staff that we had to win only one battle: for the hearts and minds of our subordinates. They will win all the rest…

Jim Mattis

MATTIS, J. (2019). CALL SIGN CHAOS: Learning to lead. S.l.: RANDOM HOUSE. 238, 239

when we’re personally involved

Daniel Kahneman performed an experiment involving a lottery run with a twist. Half the participants were randomly assigned a numbered lottery ticket. The remaining half were given a blank ticket and a pen and asked to choose their own lottery number. Just before drawing the winning number, the researchers offered to buy back all the tickets. They wanted to find out how much they would have to pay people who wrote their own number compared with people who were handed a random number. 

The rational expectation would be that there should be no difference. After all, a lottery is pure chance. Every number, whether chosen or assigned, should have the same value. An even more savvy answer would be that you should have to pay the people  who write their own number ever so slightly less, because of the possibility that there will now be duplicate numbers that, if chosen, would mean the size of the price would be cut in half. 

Neither of these turned out to be the right answer. Regardless of nationality or demographic group, people who wrote their own number always demanded at least five times more for their ticket. This reveals an important truth about human nature. When we’re personally involved in “authoring” an outcome, we are far more committed to it because we feel we own it. The underlying psychology relates to our need for control, which is a deep-rooted survival instinct.

…The lesson for change leaders? If you want to increase the motivation for (and therefore, speed of) the implementation of change, it pays to involve others in creating the aspiration, even when the answer may already be clear in the mind of the leader…. Change programs whose aspirations phase is characterized by an organization-wide, collaborative effort are 1.6 times more likely to succeed. 

Scott Keller and Bill Schaninger

Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2019

give employment to the laborer

Men and women of wealth, use your riches to give employment to the laborer! Take the idle from the crowded centres of population and place them on the untilled areas that await the hand of industry. Unlock your vaults, unloose your purses, and embark in enterprises that will give work to the unemployed, and relieve the wretchedness that leads to the vice and crime which curse your great cities, and that poison the moral atmosphere around you. Make others happy, and you will be happy yourselves.

Lorenzo Snow

Pure Religion: The Story of Church Welfare Since 1930 by Glen L. Rudd. 1995. P.365. Originally in Messages of the First Presidency, 3:334

step away

Today, most assume that Xbox was somehow destined to be a winner, but having been Microsoft’s chief Xbox officer, I am here to report that its early years were much more like a ship on the rocks than a sloop cutting through the waves.... As I reflect on surviving the near-death Xbox experience, which we turned around using a strategy process called the 3P Framework to create Xbox 360... I would humbly suggest the following:

Step away. Almost every leader’s first instinct is to dive into the engine room to fix problems he or she sees. At the depths of the Xbox process, I found myself up late at night doing manual DVD testing to identify flaws in the Xbox DVD drive. Although that level of engagement theoretically shows that you are part of the solution, it is almost always a mistake. Instead, take the time to step away from the keyboard and elevate your attention to the broader issues. How and why did we get here? What are the root causes of our dysfunction? How can I use strategy, team design, delegation, and other macro tools to guide us in a better direction? If you dive in, you encourage the team to cede responsibility to you. If you step back and provide guidance, you empower them to take ownership.

Robbie Bach

"The Big Leadership Lessons I Learned Almost Failing To Create Xbox For Microsoft" Forbes. 11/5/2015