Know Your Own Control Triggers
(from Faith and Agility in the book, The Five Insights)

Be aware of when you are fooling yourself about your need for control. If you want to create a senior team that can function without your constant leadership, be aware of these two pitfalls:

• Saying, “I trust your decision, just run it by me before you make it.” What you are really saying is that you don’t trust whoever is making that decision. Incidentally, there is nothing wrong with NOT trusting someone else’s ability to make the kind of decision you think is important, but don’t fake it.
• Waiting until after a decision is made (by the senior team) to state your opinion, particularly when you disagree with the decision. If you want to let the team make the decision on their own, then let them do it and learn from it without additional “I told you so” input. “I told you so” feedback doesn’t help anyone except perhaps to give you some odd sense of satisfaction. If you disagree with a prospective decision that may be made by the senior team, say so or don’t, but support the team’s process in the end and be there to help them clean up the mess, if one is created.

Instead, follow these two guidelines:

• Pick your role and stick to it. Leaders who want their senior teams to grow and become more capable have a hard time picking how they want to participate and sticking to it. If you want to approve/disapprove any decision made, but you don’t want to have to be the one to think through the choice of decisions, then do that. If you want to do nothing other that to watch how the senior team does managing the company without you for 6 months, then do that (I don’t recommend this approach, incidentally). If you want your opinion to be of equal weight to the rest of the team, then do that. Whatever your role will be, pick one and do your best to stick to it.
• Make sure people know what they have control over and what they don’t. Don’t think giving someone a false sense of authority as a means of bolstering their self confidence is helpful—it is not.