Learning To Let Go
For most leaders and high-achievers, letting go is awfully difficult. Knowing that you’ve got the necessary skills and knowledge to accomplish the task at hand, it’s painful to delegate or relinquish control, especially if you doubt or question the other person’s capabilities.
Additionally, the very phrase “letting go” implies that relinquishing control is going to be painful. In general, people would rather gain than lose. Of course, everyone has heard the adage “it’s better to give than to receive,” but the reason that parents so frequently admonish children to give is that everyone knows receiving is a lot more fun (and that giving is hard work).
This is a critical point: If you think of letting go as surrendering, releasing, giving, relinquishing, or any other painful-sounding synonym, you’ll always be fighting against natural human tendencies. Instead, you need to positively reframe the concept of letting go; don’t think of it as you being forced to give up something, think of it as a gift you’re giving to someone else.
The Question To Ask
What’s the gift you’re giving when you let go? Growth, learning and experience. To that end, whenever you worry that you’re holding onto a task too tightly, ask yourself, “When I give this task to someone else, what skills will they learn? What experience will they gain? How could this help them advance their career?”
The key is to think of letting go as a benefit to someone else. Of course, delegating a task to an employee is potentially extra work for them; it’s not the same as giving them a check or even an extra day off. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t benefit significantly. For instance, a Leadership IQ study found that employees who are always learning new things are literally ten times more likely to give their best effort at work. Learning new skills, gaining experience, and bolstering one’s resume are legitimate benefits. Leaders could, and should, spend time delivering hands-on teaching and coaching, but letting go of a few choice projects accomplishes a lot, and it takes no extra time or effort.
A fear of letting go isn’t a glaring character flaw; in fact, there are two very natural and predictable reasons why leaders and high-performers often struggle to relinquish control.
Reason #1: Expert Power
There are lots of ways to gain and wield power in an organization. Some, like legitimate power, require having a formal managerial or executive title, while others, like expert power, require being more skilled than others. Ironically, while expert power is often considered softer than power that comes from a position on the corporate hierarchy, it offers the potential for struggles with letting go.
Expert power is the perception that someone has an elevated level of knowledge or a specific skill set that others do not have. People follow an expert or follow the advice of an expert out of respect for their capabilities. As we know from the thousands who’ve taken the test, “Which Types Of Power Do You Use?,” expert power isn’t the most common approach, but it is popular among many leaders and high performers. And when your power comes from your expertise, giving a task or project to someone else might feel a bit like giving up power (something not many people enjoy).
Reason #2: Power Motivation
Tens of thousands have taken the online test “What Motivates You?” to discover whether their primary work motivation is Power, Achievement, Affiliation, Security or Adventure. The data from this test shows that 14% of people have a Power drive. That doesn’t seem like a large percentage until we dissect the data by job title and discover that senior executives are about 75% more likely to be motivated by Power than their employees on the frontlines.
As you might imagine, leaders with a high Power drive like to be in charge and direct others. That’s not a priori bad, but sometimes that Power drive can go too far and deteriorate into controlling behavior.
Here’s the bottom line: Struggling to let go is natural and understandable, especially for those leaders and high performers who’ve made their careers through their diligence and attention to detail. But not only can we not do everything ourselves, failing to let go deprives our employees and colleagues of the chance to learn and grow. Viewed in those terms, letting go should feel less like you’re losing something and more like you’re helping others achieve greater success and fulfillment.
