Seth Dobbs (he/him): Is it better to ask for permission or for forgiveness? Would you answer that differently? If you’re thinking about how you wanna interact with your leader versus how you want the people you lead to behave with you? Which approach do you think leads to a more motivated team, to a healthier environment?

Which approach do you think helps drive to durable results? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves.

And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results.

And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today involves moving towards leading through alignment to enable growth and durable results in the team you lead. So I’m going to talk about two different leaders and their teams and the impact on the different styles. So we’ll start with boss number one.

Boss one leverages a command and control approach. He believes in relying heavily on role power as the tool of leadership, and indeed he is commanding, and in fact, so much that acting without his permission is, let’s just say bad for you. He keeps tight control of his team by issuing orders. What should the team be working on when, how should they be doing it?

And when you take action on something that he hasn’t actually asked for, he chews you out. He even seems to derive some pleasure when you make mistakes. Yelling things like, oh, you screwed up in the open office. This can be stressful. Extremely. So it’s like walking on eggshells. You never know when something is gonna crack, and boss one is just going to go off in a rage, and sometimes it’s not so deep as that.

But violating the permission, not having permission leads to some kind of negative consequences. And this is actually very demotivating over time. I’ve worked in an environment like this and everyone on the team starts making decisions based on not. Getting yelled at, which I can tell you that kind of fear typically doesn’t lead to the best results and definitely not durable.

The team starts having a harder time rallying together. Because no one wants to get the collateral damage from being associated with someone else that acted without permission. So I want you to think, how can a team really succeed in this kind of environment? How can a team grow and thrive with this kind of fear?

Again, from personal experience, I will tell you not particularly well. I worked in an environment like this and the outcome was that at some point we basically, the team hit a phase where someone was giving notice every week or two until almost every single person from the team had left. Now that’s probably not too surprising an outcome to you.

Permission-based leadership can be pretty harsh. I think many of us recognize that kind of control is just not good, and it definitely doesn’t lead to durable results. It’s hard to have something long lasting with that kind of turnover rate that I saw. So enough of Boss one for now, let’s move on to boss number two.

Boss two feels like she’s a more enlightened leader and believes in forgiveness. She had actually worked for someone like Boss One in her early days and hated it. She promised herself that when she moved into a leadership position, she’d give more space for growth by just not bossing, but giving more open space.

And so that’s how she leads. She makes her directives clear, what she wants you to do and how to get it done, but she gives space to do things differently and prove her wrong. So being on her team is interesting. It feels like there’s a lot of openness and opportunity, at least at first, but there’s stress in this environment because people know it might be okay and take a risk to try something different that you might be forgiven if everything turns out all right.

But what if things don’t turn out right? So the members of Boss Two’s organization start saying things like, well, this is the way we do it. It’s the way we always do it. And so, even though, at least in some particular cases, the official approach from Boss two doesn’t make sense. Few, if any, really wanna try to buck the system, alright, to seek forgiveness because it feels risky unless it’s really, really important.

And so even though boss two will tell everyone it’s okay to do something different, the forgiveness, the as long as it really works out part, actually tells you something different, right? Especially if the situation, the work is such that you might not see the results of your decisions for months.

This potential for forgiveness for doing something different might feel like something that’s hanging over your head for those months. You might hear this forgiveness based boss, boss two say something like, we’re still waiting to see how all this works out. How does that motivate people to take a risk?

How do people decide that a risk is worth taking? What guidelines do they really have, especially when the boss is still just talking about how to do things? So this starts to lead to organizational inertia. People still start becoming unwilling to try anything new. Maybe there’s less fear. There’s a few team members that will boldly take action and seek forgiveness later.

But how confident does that really make them feel? There’s inherent stress in knowing that you’re going against the grain, even if you believe you’re right. If you think you’re gonna need to be forgiven. How does Boss two create more leaders? She’s teaching them how to please her, how to justify displeasing her at essence, not how to do their best and bring the best out in others, and what is forgiveness anyway?

When we think about is it better to seek permission or seek forgiveness in a work situation, what does forgiveness mean? Do we have to apologize? Do you need to go on bended knee and ask to be forgiven? Are you asking that of your team? So the stress of feeling like you’re going against the grain without knowing whether or not you’ll be forgiven, doesn’t result in a team that’s creating durable results because of all this kind of stress and worry that comes with it.

So in some ways, you’re not much better off here than with boss one. And so that brings us to the principle for today. Don’t require permission or forgiveness. I think that the whole, is it better to ask permission or forgiveness concept? It is a false dichotomy and worse, a dichotomy with nothing but bad options.

And that’s because I think the underlying message of both is that taking unasked four actions is bad. Either requiring punishment in the permission world or a chance to explain your way to forgiveness in the forgiveness world, but why would you want your team members to think either of those things?

Both of those paths are actually rooted in a command and control mindset with forgiveness perhaps being a gentler mode of it. So if you shouldn’t seek permission and forgiveness really isn’t much better, what’s left? You should seek alignment. The problem with Boss one, centering on permission and boss two, centering on forgiveness is that both of their approaches are centered on doing things, the what and the how.

Now, alignment is an overused word in the business world, so I’m going to be clear here what I’m talking about, and that’s being aligned on the outcomes you’re trying to reach, being aligned on the why. Why are you trying to reach these outcomes? And if you’re new to working through outcomes, this can seem like a lot of work that can be just a lot easier to center on do on what?

On the how. But if you’ve been listening to previous episodes, you’ve hopefully started working on adopting an outcome mindset. Leading through alignment is about making the outcomes clear, making the impacts that you want your team to reach, why they’re necessary, making all that clear, and then giving them the space to work through the challenges to get to those results.

In other words, you should lead with a clear vision and foster a positive problem resolution environment. So let’s look at this more, principle driven leader. Let’s talk about boss number three. Boss three. They strive to think less about how they might do things and focus on making outcomes clear, filling in assumptions, constraints, and other contexts as to what those outcomes might look like and why it’s important.

Now this working for Boss three can be unnerving at first, especially if you’ve spent your career under Bosses one and two. But the alignment focus leader like Boss three leads through outcomes and objectives. So for example, instead of telling the team that they need to write some report, they’ll say, we need to provide information to leadership so that they can make timely decisions on, say, investing in manufacturing.

That gives the team a different way to think about the work than just writing some report or they the, they might inform you that we’re doing poorly amongst the whatever particular demographic. How can we improve that? Or maybe you’ll hear a new competitor has taken over some of our market share on the west coast.

We need to regain share. Let’s talk about it. The Alignment Leader also talks about constraints and assumptions. Things like, well, we’ve already purchased this technology. We have to leverage it. Or other sunk cost concepts, or maybe we’ve advertised availability of the product for DEF December 1st, and we can’t change that advertisement date.

We put money into it. Again, this is a constraint. It’s not just like this has to be done by December 1st. There’s a reason behind it that you might be able to work with your team might be able to work with it when you explain it this way, or we have inconsistent data on our customers in different systems.

We have no idea what’s happening. It’s not just we need to build a single database. There’s actually a problem here that’s driving it, right? So all of this, this isn’t a tight set of instructions, and because of that, the team’s gonna make mistakes. Of course, we’re all human. But in this scenario, when team members run into problems instead of fear, they know Boss three is there to support them.

And so over time, once you get past maybe the confusion of not just being told what to do, this kind of interaction becomes motivating. Bo three will happily talk through the their approaches, make sure they’re clear on priorities and outcomes, and ask questions to better align approaches with desired outcomes Until there’s far less negative tension in Bo Three’s organization than in the first two.

And in fact, when you do this, you’ll see several things happening in your organization. You’ll start seeing more organizational as well as individual growth and collective aspiration. Team members become, more confident in trying something different and trying something new. Meaning you start seeing better results and you see more ownership, which leads to more durable results, right?

The organization becomes better at making forward motion because no people don’t have to be bossed anymore, and they’re not worried. The boss doesn’t have to be present. Your team takes ownership and moves forward and because of this boss three and finds that they have more time to take on higher level challenges to think about the future rather than just worrying about bestowing permission or forgiveness for every little action.

This principle don’t require permission or forgiveness is core to creating leaders. Working towards alignment gives the folks you lead the space to make their own decisions, to align their work with your broader vision, and to resolve problems that get in the way of the outcomes that they’re trying to reach.

In other words, it gives them the space to become a leader themselves. So I think most folks today understand the downfalls of an authoritarian permission-based style to leadership. My experience, however, is that the notion of forgiveness while prevalent is just another side of the same coin.

Expecting an apology, expecting someone to seek forgiveness for a positively motivated attempt to reach desired outcomes is ultimately controlling. And worse, both of these mindsets can be demotivating and lead to your team acting out of worry of losing their jobs, which is not a great place to be. It suppresses innovation, it suppresses change.

People truly trying, wanting to try something different. It suppresses the best your team can bring you because whatever they do has to be good enough to warrant explaining in this, um, permit, in this forgiveness world. But if you align on principles and outcomes, the notion of permission and forgiveness should never come up.

Now, some people that are used to our permission world might need a little bit of coaching, like, Hey, go ahead and try this. Don’t worry. Forgiveness is in your future, but you want to break away from that. So they ultimately understand that alignment is the key. Is your team acting in alignment with your principles and working towards their prioritized outcomes?

Look at your team today. Is that happening? And if not, you should ask yourself why not? And help them reach alignment. Working through alignment brings the best out in your team. It gives them the room to bring their own experiences and ideas towards reaching outcomes. It’s why you hired them after all right?

Not just to do what you tell them, but to actually achieve things. If you wanted to do all of their jobs, why are you doing yours? You hired them. Let them do their best, and if they make mistakes, support them in getting better. If they make mistakes because you didn’t ensure that they were aligned on outcomes.

You might be the one that needs forgiveness. Instead, just work through and make sure we’re continually working towards alignment. So in closing, think about this. Do you really require permission or forgiveness? And what’s leading you to that approach? Can you take a step towards alignment today by just sharing a few of your own principles or the outcomes you’re trying to reach?

Can you provide a few guardrails to help your team’s decision making instead of just providing a list of instructions? And what’s stopping you from telling your team to seek neither permission nor forgiveness, but rather to seek alignment starting today. Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it, and join me next time when

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