What is Participative Leadership?
The importance of involving employees in making decisions
You want to lead your team to the best of your ability. But should you be participative when making decisions or save time by making them yourself?
Being a participative leader means involving your team in making some, but not all, key decisions. But first of all, what are the reasons why some managers aren’t very participative? A major reason is that they think they need to be strong, tough, independent and decisive to be seen as an effective manager. They feel that being participative might make them seem weak or indecisive. One executive who went around asking his new team members their views was asked by an old timer: “Do you want me to tell you how to do your job?” This old timer was simply behaving in accordance with the cultural values that pervade most organizations dominated as they are by masculine values. In this context, employees expect their managers to make decisions and not need to ask for input from their teams. Some managers also like the feeling of being in control and having the power to call the shots. Finally, there is time pressure. It is often faster for managers to make decisions themselves.
The Benefits of Participative Leadership
Why should you adopt a participative leadership style? Today, so many workers are intelligent, highly skilled professionals. Motivating employees who are knowledge workers is based on making them feel valued. There is simply no better way to make people feel valued than to ask them, genuinely, for their advice. You can pat people on the back and recognize their efforts but this is not as effective in motivating people as involving them in important decisions. The second main reason to be participative is a corollary of the first. Employees who play a part in deciding what to do feel a much greater amount of ownership over making it happen.
In addition, much of today’s work has a high knowledge component that requires people to think and solve problems. Our work is increasingly mental work. Management has often been described as getting work done through others. At one time, much of that work involved tasks, doing things that had a greater physical than mental component. With such work, delegation is the key means of getting work done through others. But when a team needs to think creatively to solve complex problems, improve productivity or develop a new product, the best way to get such mental work done through people is to ask them for their suggestions. This switch to mental work makes the manager’s job one of asking employees what to do rather than telling them, a complete 180 degree change of direction from days gone by.
If the work you manage has a high mental component, you simply can’t get it done without involving people in decisions.
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