14. ALLOW PEOPLE TO BE FULLY RESPONSIBLE
Without realizing it, too many leaders assume that the role of leadership is to control. They espouse Plato’s “division of labor,” which, according to social thinker Hannah Arendt, has influenced government and military structures for thousands of years.1 With the advent of the industrial revolution, she argues, corporate action, like the action of monarchies and armies, proceeded in two phases: planning and execution. Accordingly, in most organizations you find a class-divided lot: the minds and the bodies, the brains and the backs, the knowers and the doers, the manipulators and the manipulated.
Organizations that perpetuate this leader/led distinction tend to be riddled with justification and blame. ...
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