Leadership is not control

By David Neddam

When control looks like commitment

You are the first one in. You go over the schedule, fix a booking, rewrite a message sent to a guest, answer the day’s complaint yourself. Nothing gets past you.

From the outside, it looks like high standards. Often it is.

But ask what your team learned that day. That the work will be redone. That the final decision is not theirs. That it is safer to wait for your opinion.

Control makes sure the work is done the way you would have done it. Leadership makes sure it is done well when you are not there. Both take attention. They do not build the same team.

What control produces over time

A closely controlled team does not become careless. It becomes cautious. It asks more questions than it makes decisions. It reports problems instead of solving them. It does what is asked, correctly, and stops there.

The owner often sees this as proof that checking everything was right. “If I don’t look, nothing moves.” Sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is the result of the control, not the reason for it.

Research points the same way. A meta-analysis published in 2018 in the journal Motivation and Emotion brought together 72 studies and more than 32,000 employees. When leaders support their team’s autonomy, employees show more autonomous motivation, greater well-being and more positive behavior at work.

Gallup, for its part, estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement between business units.

These studies cover organizations of every kind, not specifically spas or hospitality. And an association is not proof of a cause. But the direction is consistent: what the person in charge does matters.

What it usually hides

Control is rarely a character trait. It is often an answer to something else.

A standard that was never written down, and that only you know. A past mistake that cost a lot. A difficult conversation, postponed, and replaced by one more check. A responsibility handed over without the authority that goes with it.

In each of these cases, checking more fixes nothing. It moves the work back to you.

What to look at before changing anything

Do not decide to delegate everything overnight. First, for one week, look at what comes up to you.

1. Which decisions did you make this week that someone else could have made?
2. For each one, what was missing: the information, the criterion, the authority or the trust?
3. When you correct a piece of work, do you explain what makes the result good, or do you simply redo it?
4. What happens when you are away for three days: are decisions made, or do they wait?
5. Is there a conversation you are replacing with control?

Each answer points to different work: a standard to clarify, an authority to define, a person to train, a discussion to have. It is not the same work, and not always the one you expected.

What it changes

Leading without controlling everything does not mean you stop looking. The standards stay. They move: less on each gesture, more on what the team understands, decides and owns.

It does not happen in a week, and not every decision is meant to be delegated. Some involve the money, the safety or the reputation of the business, and remain yours.

But the measure changes. A leader is no longer judged by what they checked during the day.

They are judged by what the team can do without them.

Sources and research

Slemp, G. R., Kern, M. L., Patrick, K. J. and Ryan, R. M. (2018). Leader autonomy support in the workplace: A meta-analytic review. Motivation and Emotion, 42(5), 706–724. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9698-y

Gallup (2014). Why Great Managers Are So Rare. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/231593/why-great-managers-rare.aspx