The Jackson Eleven applied to Dev Teams: 2.- Bench the ego
The main theme of the first article in these series revolved around the concept of leading inside out, that is, to show yourself as you are and avoid building a character to disguise your true self when leading people. Nonetheless, as we are going to see through all these articles dedicated to the Jackson Eleven principles from Phil Jackson, some of them should be applied jointly in order to make true sense. In my opinion this is the case of today’s concept: bench the ego. We talked about leading from the inside out before but, what if you are some kind of douchebag that tries to impose everything on the team because that is what you think is good without taking into account their opinion and vision? Leading from the inside out while also benching the ego is fundamental to achieve a nice work environment with your collaborators.
The first thing that comes to our mind when reading the sentence “bench the ego” is to be humble. However, for Jackson, this phrase not only refers to being humble as a leader, but also to empower your team in order to distribute leadership through them. As he says in his book, “The more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became. I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority”. For those of you that read this article and are also basketball fans, you will probably remember that in the Chicago Bulls, even if Jordan had a prominent role, everyone on the team had its own purpose and took advantage of their strengths to help the team as a whole. That was without doubt one of the keys to their sucess.
The concept of team empowerment is in fact one of the principles contained in the Agile Manifesto, where we can read: “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done”. In my opinion one of the keywords in this principle is support. One of the main responsibilities of any management position is to provide the people all they need in order to do their job correctly. Also to listen to their needs or things that are holding them back. Besides, the team needs to have an alignment around common goals if we want to really empower them. Otherwise each one may follow their own path. Moreove, I find that many ideas from the Agile world draw from the well-known paradigm of Lean that helped Toyota and many other companies become leaders in their sectors. In The Toyota Way, a book from Liker, we can find these ideas mainly in two of the 14 principles mentioned:
- “Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.”
- “Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy.”
These sentences introduce another concept that is really important in team empowerment: learning from experienced people that are willing to teach. A team where everyone has always in their mind the need of teaching others will be much more productive and favour personal and professional development. As usual, all these concepts are not totally new and they have been applied many times in several companies, organizations and through history.
Time for history
As you probably noticed in the leading inside-out article, I really love to look into the past and learn from historical leaders or classical texts, establishing parallelisms with current situations. In the case of benching the ego and distributing leadership I like to think about two special cases, quite separated in time. On one hand we find the leading style of Alexander the Great. After his early death, the Diadochi, the generals that succeeded him, started many conflicts so each one of them could rule the empire left by the macedonian leader. In the end, one of the greatest empires in history was divided in other nations as Alexander’s generals were not able to bench the ego, probably caused by the inheritance of Alexander’s own ego. He was truly a great conqueror, but not such a great leader in the long term as he was unable to delegate responsibilities to his generals and take into account the goals of his people as a whole and not only his own vision of ruling the whole ancient world. This was probably one of the facts that caused in the end the division of his empire.
On the contrary, in more recent times, Queen Victoria can be seen as a historical paradigmatic example of good delegation and distribution of leadership. During her reign, England became the main power of the modern world in many ways (military, economic, political…) partly because she allowed the experts to make their own decisions and take charge of their responsibilities in their own specialities. This situation was probably caused in some way due to her being crowned at the age of 18, leaving the decisions during the beginning of her reign to advisers such as Disraeli. Nonetheless, with age she gained much more expertise and Victoria started to involve herself in more decisions while also maintaining the freedom of her experts in their own strength areas.
Wrapping up
As a summary, the whole bench your ego thing can be summarised in a short concept. Never ever be that type of person that imposes his opinion on the team. Distribute leadership, listen carefully to your team and plan your actions accordingly. Learn from them and their strenghts and build a common mission and vision for all to follow. Remember that you’re not an expert in every topic, but in fact supported by a team of people with experience in many fields. Each person in the team can have a leading role in its own way.
Take into account however that distributing leadership doesn’t mean that you can disperse your responsibility over your team. In the end, you are the manager figure and you should act as that. Remember that Jackson says “[…] without surrendering final authority”. In that sense, I’d like to end the article with one reminder not only to managers or leaders but also to any person in a team regarding ego through a nice quote from Ernest Hemingway: “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self”.
