Ownership Versus Dictatorship In Leadership   Leading people can be easy, if you want to be a total dictator and just order everyone around. The way of doing everything has to be specified and the detail has to be scrutinised within an inch of its life, all the time.  All the ideas have to come from you and all you want is passive acceptance from the team. They are the arms and legs and you are the brain, in super command mode.  Actually there are plenty of leaders like that in Japan. The control part works just fine because you are in control of everything.  This means your entire day is broken up in firing out orders and then checking to make sure they were executed in the exact format you had specified. This uber control method has a lot of consistency and predictability to it.  Compliance heads love this environment, because it is all about controls. This is the Theory X leader that Douglas McGregor wrote about in his study of motivation.  The leader working on the basis of strict controls and severe penalties for non-compliance.   At a certain point of scale though, this breaks down because you just can’t manage enough time in the day to interact with each person individually or check up on their work directly.  This is where you need middle managers.  You can apply this same management technique to Middle Managers, but you personally are removed no from the front line.   You are also limited to how much innovation you can expect in the business.  This would be fine, if there were no competitors in the market and that they also were not innovating.  That never happens, so while we are gaining super control over our own business, we are handing the field over to our competitors who can out innovate us.   We also face succession planning problems.  Who can move yup through the ranks and lead, if all potential leaders have grown up on hand held spoon feeding by the bog boss?  We need capable people to take over.  The issue is capable people will quit that type of environment, because they have their own ideas and aspirations and they feel suffocated by all of this top down dictatorship.   We know that people will feel ownership of the world they help to create.  This invites us as leaders to involve our people in the business we are running.  We want their engagement.  If they are not engaged why would they care about doing things better.  To get innovation we need engagement, to get engagement we need to provide a sense of ownership.   What happens though when the person you look to for leadership, for innovation, for creating ideas doesn’t come to the party.  Japan is a country of following orders and many people are happy with that.  Tell me what to do and I will do it very well, but don’t ask me what to do. This isn’t all that helpful when we are trying to skate to where the puck is going to be in business. We have no clear road map of the future and we have to think about what our business will look like in five years time. What will the marketplace look like then, our competitors, our suppliers, etc.  The boss can’t tell you that.  We all have t work together to divine the future and then make our plans on that basis.   As a leader we can be making a big effort to give ownership of this process to our subordinates, but we notice that some grab the chance and others don’t.  People in Middle Management have been given the opportunity to come up with their vision for the department for the future and that have produced exactly nothing after many months.  What do we do?   We may instinctively feel that we need to give people ownership, so the dictator role model is ruled out.  But we notice they are not thriving in this “you own the business” environment.  The first thing to realise is that not everyone is like you or wants to be like you as a leader.  Some people need a dictator to tell them what to do here in japan. That would be you, so play that role.   You may decide that your leadership team cannot carry the weight o