The Destructive Impact of Command and Control

The dominance of command and control is having devastating impacts. There has been a dramatic increase in worker disengagement; few organizations are succeeding at solving problems; and leaders are being scapegoated and fired.

Most people associate command and control leadership with the military. Years ago, I worked for the U. S. Army Chief of Staff. I, like most people, thought I’d see command and control leadership there. The great irony is that the military learned long ago that, if you want to win, you have to engage the intelligence of everyone involved in the battle. The Army had a visual reminder of this when, years ago, they developed new tanks and armored vehicles that traveled at unprecedented speeds of 50 miles an hour. When first used in battle during the first Gulf War, several times troops took off on their own, speeding across the desert at high speed. However, according to Army doctrine, tanks and armored vehicles must be accompanied by a third vehicle that literally is called the Command and Control Vehicle. This vehicle could only travel at 20 miles an hour. (They corrected this problem.)

For me, this is a familiar image people in the organization ready and willing to do good work, wanting to contribute their ideas, and ready to take responsibility, and leaders holding them back, insisting that they wait for decisions or instructions. The result is dispirited employees and leaders wondering why no one takes responsibility or gets engaged anymore. In these troubled, uncertain times, we don’t need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone’s intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.

We Know How to Create Smart, Resilient Organizations

We do know how to create workplaces that are flexible, smart, and resilient. We have known for more than half a century that engaging people and relying on self-managed teams is far more productive than any other form of organizing. In fact, productivity gains in self-managed work environments are at minimum 35 percent higher than in traditionally managed organizations. And workers know this to be true when they insist that they can make smarter decisions than those delivered from on high.

With so much evidence supporting the benefits of participation, why isn’t every organization using self-managed teams to cope with turbulence? Instead, organizations increasingly are cluttered with control mechanisms that paralyze employees and leaders alike. Where have all these policies, procedures, protocols, laws, and regulations come from? And why do we keep creating more, even as we suffer from the terrible consequences of over-control?

Even though worker capacity and motivation are destroyed when leaders choose power over productivity, it appears that bosses would rather be in control than have the organization work well. And this drive for power is supported by the belief that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to hold power tightly. What’s so dangerous about this belief is that just the opposite is true. Successful organizations, including the military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone’s commitment and intelligence. When leaders hold onto power and refuse to distribute decision-making, they create slow, unwieldy, Byzantine systems that only increase risk and irresponsibility. We never effectively control people or situations by these means; we only succeed in preventing intelligent, fast responses.

The personal impact on leaders’ morale and health is also devastating. When leaders take back power, when they act as heroes and saviors, they end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and deeply stressed. It is simply not possible to solve single handedly the organization’s problems there are just too many of them! One leader who led a high-risk chemical plant spent three years creating a highly motivated, self-organizing workforce. He described it this way: “Instead of just me worrying about the plant, I now have nine hundred people worrying. And coming up with solutions I never could have imagined.”

Sometimes leaders fail to involve staff out of some warped notion of kindness. They don’t include people or share their worries because they don’t want to add to their stress. But such well-meaning leaders only create more problems. When leaders fail to engage people in finding solutions to problems that affect them, staff don’t thank the leader for not sharing the burden. Instead, they withdraw, criticize, worry, and gossip. They interpret the leader’s exercise of power as a sign that he or she doesn’t trust them or their capacities.

Assessing Changes in Your Leadership

With no time to reflect on how they might be changing, with no time to contemplate whether their present leadership is creating an effective and resilient organization, too many leaders drift into command and control, wondering why nothing seems to be working, angry that no one seems motivated any more. If you are feeling stressed and pressured, please know that this is how most leaders feel these days. Yet it is important that you take time to notice how your own leadership style has changed in response to the pressures of this uncertain time. Otherwise, you may end up disappointed and frustrated, leaving a legacy of failure rather than of real results.

Some Questions to Think About

Here are questions to help you notice if your leadership is slipping into command and control mode. If you feel courageous, circulate these questions and talk about them with staff.

1. What’s changed in the way you make decisions? Have you come to rely on the same group of advisors? Do you try to engage those who have a stake in the decision?
2. What’s happening to staff motivation? How does it compare to a few years ago?
3. How often do you find yourself invoking rules, policies, or regulations to get staff to do something?
4. How often do you respond to a problem by developing a new policy?
5. What information are you no longer sharing with staff? Where are you more transparent?
6. What’s the level of trust in your organization right now? How does this compare to two to three years ago?
7. When people make mistakes, what happens? Are staff encouraged to learn from their experience? Or is there a search for someone to blame?
8. What’s the level of risk-taking in the organization? How does this compare to two to three years ago?
9. How often have you reorganized in the past few years? What have you learned from that?
10. How’s your personal energy and motivation these days? How does this compare to a few years ago?

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In her earlier writings, Wheatley deepened her readers’ understanding of how systems behave. The world is inherently orderly, she has said, as she invited us to live simply as partners within its playful dance. In this book, she goes a step further—she exhorts us to collectively birth the future.

Conversational Practices

The book is organized in three parts. The first part sets out the power, the courage, and the practices of conversation. Wheatley has been hosting dialogues of various kinds for a decade. But her appreciation of the potential of conversation has been deepened by two approaches that generate deep insights, a strong sense of community, and innovative possibilities for action. From Christina Baldwin, Wheatley gained a deeper understanding of circle and council practices for evoking compassionate listening and authentic conversation. From Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, she has incorporated the World Café, an exciting way to focus on “conversations that matter and questions that travel well.” This approach links small-group conversations in a way that causes knowledge to grow and the collective wisdom of the group to become visible to participants. Based on learnings from these and other sources, Wheatley founded The Four Directions, a global initiative that links local circles of leaders in a worldwide network on behalf of life affirming futures.

The brief second portion of the book is devoted to simple yet captivating sketches by Vivienne Flesher, coupled with pithy hand-scripted statements such as “It’s not differences that divide us. It’s our judgments about each other that do.” These statements or questions, often accompanied by a thought-provoking quotation, lend an “open-journal” feel to the book. Some readers may be prompted to add their own thoughts to these pages, making it an even more personal document.

Profound Challenges

It is the third part of the book that most people will find particularly useful. The author calls this last and longest section “Conversation Starters.” Each of the 10 “chapters” provides the framework for a conversation that readers themselves might host. With stories, quotations, and poetry interspersed throughout, Wheatley has lovingly compiled a set of resources that compel readers to thoughtful action on profound challenges.

For instance, she asks, “When have I experienced working for the common good?” and prompts conversation groups to dig deep inside to answer such questions as “How many times were you surprised by someone’s ingenuity, or your own?” She concludes this topic by reminding us that “if we raised our expectations, then it wouldn’t take a crisis for us to experience the satisfaction of working together, the joy of doing work that serves other human beings. And then we would discover, as the Chinese author of the Tao te Ching wrote 2,500 years ago, that ‘the good becomes common as grass.’”

This is an inspirational book at its core. It frees us to be our better selves. It’s all about service and community, and caring and unselfish behaviors. Because of its early 2002 publishing date, Wheatley must have written much of the material prior to the September 11 attacks, yet each page pulses with thoughts readers will find even more provocative since that dreadful day. One page features a World Trade Center survivor’s words: “We didn’t save ourselves. We tried to save each other.” Life is, indeed, too short to be selfish.

Wheatley also shares with us her experiences of the sacred, which is nothing special, she says—just all of life. She ends with an Aztec story about a forest fire, an owl, and a small Quetzal bird who attempts to put out the fire with tiny droplets from its beak. The owl questions this behavior, pointing out the futility of it all, but the tiny bird says, “I’m doing the best I can with what I have.”

That is, after all, the best any of us might do. Conversation, Wheatley says, requires that we extend ourselves to others, curious about what their stories might hold. For in the telling, the teller and the listener each becomes more fully human. And finally, she exhorts us, to trust that meaningful conversations can change our world.

Karen Speerstra (kspeerstra@aol.com) is a coach, writer, and editor based in central Vermont. During her 20-year career in professional and college text publishing, she was publishing director at Butterworth-Heinemann and founded a line of business books focusing on knowledge management, visionary leadership, change management, HR, and organizational development.

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