02/05/2024

The Power of Delegating

It’s a good time to check if your culture promotes it

Association executives have a lot of teams to manage—boards, staffs, committees—all of which are prone to disruption. There are all sorts of reasons for that, but one underappreciated one is how included participants feel they are—or aren't—in the team.

Or, worse, participants are passive-aggressively told what their role on the team is. In a recent piece at the MIT Sloan Management Review, business scholars David Hollis and Alex Wright call this practice “managerial ventriloquism.” This is different than simply telling team members what their tasks are; rather, it’s where people in the middle presume to say what top leadership wants. (Think “The CEO wants….” or “The board would like…”)

It’s a recipe for alienation all around, they write: “Speaking for others in this way engenders a managerial culture where responsibility is forever being passed on to someone else, with no one willing to take ownership of decisions.”

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.