It has been my experience that many leaders tend towards black and white thinking in their earliest stages of growth and only grow into those able to compromise later in their development.  Some of this I attribute to the strength of many leaders’ personalities prior to its maturation.

With that tendency, it’s not difficult to see that a leader may establish a boundary for himself/herself with an absoluteness that allows no room for choices on the part of others.  This poster hopes to present an alternative to that less than effective leadership strategy.

When brought to a conscious level, leaders readily see that even within the most stringent boundaries, there is room for others to make many more choices than first imagined.

By way of example I might tell my grandchild that they can’t play at the top of the stairs for my fear of them falling down the stairs.  That’s my boundary.  However, it leaves much room for him to make choices to play in other locations.

I sometimes would accuse my wife of having no boundaries.  She would say to a neighbor, “You can come over anytime tomorrow morning.”  That sounded way too “boundaryless” for me.  Nevertheless, now I understand she did have a boundary (tomorrow morning), and she just gave them choices inside that boundary.

The benefits of this approach are numerous.  If I give my followers choices, I can hold them responsible for the ones they choose.  If I tell them what to do, I am the one responsible for the outcome (even if they do exactly what I told them to do).

If I give my followers choices, I empower them to become other leaders.  If I don’t, I only create more followers with a sense of learned dependency on me.

Consider where you might be able to give you followers more choices without it blurring your boundaries at all.  I believe you’ll be personally surprised where you might give choices that never occurred to you.

You might also wish to compare this poster with the one entitled Effective Delegation to process this concept on yet another level.

Categories: Affiliation, Assertiveness, Intensity, Listening, Self Responsibility