John Maxwell once said that leaders become great “not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others”.
It is one of those quotes that sounds obvious until you consider what it actually demands of the person with the power.
For much of my career, I occupied positions in which people expected me to have answers and make decisions. That is the job, after all.
A chief executive who responds to every difficult question by suggesting another conversation will not remain chief executive for very long. We all have painful experiences of indecisive leaders. It’s even worse if it is the president of the country not taking the most obvious decisions!
I often reflect on my own journey and can’t help but conclude that it was my “decisiveness” that propelled my rise to the CEO’s office. But power to decide can create a dangerous illusion: because the decision is yours to make, you begin to believe the answer must also be yours to find.
It is flattering, occasionally efficient, and often wrong.
Working with leaders from technical backgrounds, which is most of us, I see how the hardest part for them is to accept that they are no longer the smartest person in the room, nor are they meant to be. The other voices, the different perspectives can enrich the decision, but only if we learn how to have critical conversations and also learn to listen. The people closest to a problem frequently understand parts of it that the leader cannot see.
Employees know where systems fail in practice; communities understand consequences that are invisible from a corporate office; investors see risks that management may prefer to understate; and those without positional authority often know exactly what is going wrong but have learnt that saying so carries more risk than remaining silent.
A leader can have all the formal power in the room and still have only part of the truth. Surely this should be obvious.
This is where conversation should matter, not because talking is an achievement, but because leadership requires more than gathering people together and allowing them to speak. It requires creating the conditions in which what they say can influence what happens next.
But how this happens internally, within the power structures and hierarchy of a company, is not as straightforward as it sounds. Similarly, it takes a different approach to have impactful critical conversations at an industry or societal level.
Real empowerment
I believe that critical conversations should result in empowerment — empowerment to act and to have an impact. We use the word “empowerment” rather loosely.
Sometimes it means delegation: I have decided what must be done, and I now empower you to do it. Sometimes it means encouragement: I believe in you, so off you go. Both have their place, but neither asks much of the leader beyond releasing a task while retaining ownership of the answer.
Real empowerment is more uncomfortable because it allows somebody else’s knowledge, experience or judgment to affect the decision itself. It requires the leader or conversation participant to listen without already knowing what they intend to conclude and to accept that a person with less authority may have a better understanding of the issue.
That is much harder than handing over a responsibility.
We often say that we want honest conversations, but what we really want is honesty that confirms our preferred version of events. We invite challenge, then become defensive when challenged; we ask people to speak freely, then remember exactly who said what; and we encourage different perspectives until one of them threatens the decision we had hoped everybody would support. I have probably done all three ... likely in the past week or two.
The result is not empowerment. It is participation without influence, which may be even worse than not asking people at all because it creates the appearance that they were heard while teaching them that speaking changes nothing.
This is also why so many conferences, stakeholder forums and leadership sessions are dismissed as talk shops. The criticism is not always that people talked too much; it is that those with the power to act listened, nodded, thanked everyone for their contribution and carried on as before.
The conversation had no consequence because the people holding authority never allowed it to disturb their thinking or change their behaviour.
We should be clear about where responsibility lies. A conference cannot approve a mining right, allocate capital, change policy, instruct a chief executive or implement a strategy. The platform may expose the problem, bring the right people together and make competing views visible, but the authority to act remains with the leaders and institutions that possessed it before the conversation began.
Blaming the conversation because nothing happened afterwards can therefore become a convenient way for leaders to avoid a more direct question: you heard what was said, you hold the authority, so what did you do?
Not a veto
That question applies just as forcefully to the people participating in the conversation. Empowerment does not remove accountability from the leader, and place it nowhere.
Once people have been given a genuine opportunity to influence the answer, they also inherit some responsibility for what follows: to contribute honestly, confront inconvenient facts, reconsider their own positions and help carry the outcome beyond the room.
Otherwise, we create another comfortable arrangement in which leaders pretend to listen and everybody else reserves the right to complain.
That is certainly not what I am trying to achieve at the industry conferences and conversations that I am part of, but I am also not deaf to the murmuring of the people who feel that not enough action follows from these events.
A critical conversation should make that arrangement impossible.
It should require those with power to listen closely enough to be influenced and those seeking influence to accept the responsibility that accompanies it. It should expose where authority actually sits, what remains unresolved and who must now do something with what has been heard.
This does not mean every conversation must produce agreement.
Empowering people is not the same as giving everyone a veto, and listening does not oblige a leader to accept every argument. The leader may hear all the perspectives and still make an unpopular decision because leadership cannot be outsourced to the room.
But there is a difference between making a difficult decision after listening and performing the ritual of consultation around a decision that was never open to examination. People usually know which one has happened.
Conversations that matter
Perhaps the real test of leadership is therefore not whether the leader had the power to make the final call, but whether the process enlarged the ability of others to understand, contribute and act.
Did more people leave capable of exercising judgment, or did they merely receive another instruction? Did the conversation distribute responsibility, or did it reinforce the idea that all meaningful thinking still belongs at the top?
I find myself increasingly interested in conversations that place both power and responsibility under that kind of pressure. Not conversations designed to manufacture agreement, showcase important people or produce another declaration, but conversations in which the participants may genuinely affect the thinking, and must then accept some ownership of what follows.
There are difficult issues in mining, business and South Africa more broadly that will not be solved by one powerful person arriving with the answer.
They require leaders secure enough to hear what they do not know, people courageous enough to say what those leaders may not want to hear, and both sides mature enough to accept that being heard creates responsibility rather than merely entitlement.
If leadership is ultimately the ability to empower others, conversation is one of the places where we discover whether that belief is real.
Because if everybody has spoken and the person at the top still owns every answer, every decision and every next step, nobody has been empowered … we have merely given them a microphone that is switched off.
Bernard Swanepoel is chair of the Joburg Indaba and Junior Indaba, and describes himself as a ‘mining optimist’. This article is republished with his permission
