How To Avoid Abdication That Will Help You Be A Better Leader

Abdication is a persistent leadership failure.

“I showed them how to do it multiple times,” someone on my leadership team said to me.

I replied, “well how important is this area of our business?” I knew the answer, but as leaders, we can’t talk for our teams.

We have to build disfluency, which means the more someone has to wrestle with something, the more they’ll learn.

“It’s very important. It’s the last thing the client sees,” she remarked.

Because this was a high-stakes area of our business, I coached her on needing a better feedback loop to ensure this responsibility/task was being taken care of, which would in turn reduce her anxiety.

As leaders, we’re Chief Repeat Officers. We often need to repeat things hundreds of times, especially in critically important areas.

Leaders abdicate of four reasons:

• They respond emotionally to the feeling of being out of control.
• They don’t like doing a particular “thing,” whether it be a task, project, or responsibility.
• They’re overwhelmed.
• They make a mistake in assessing a person’s competency level for a given area.

To overcome abdications, leaders must focus on:

• How they hand off the task, project, or responsibility.
• The level of control the task/project/person requires. Does this area need more oversight?
• Their information needs, creating effective feedback loops.

Abdication is not delegation. It often leads to fixing more problems and requiring more “work.”

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