The Handle

Do you ever feel like your life is out of control? In the song “Locomotive Breath,” Jethro Tull sings:

Oh, he feels the piston scraping
Steam breaking on his brow
Old Charlie stole the handle
And the train it won’t stop going, 
No it won’t slow down

Tull said the song was about overpopulation. It’s definitely not about a train engineer with halitosis. However, many people interpret the song to be about a man whose life has spiraled out of control.

If you are like many leaders, you have experienced this feeling, or you may feel that way right now. Interestingly, the normative response to feeling like you have lost control is to grasp for more. People in difficult situations they cannot control often become focused on over controlling things that are still in their power. However, the secret to successful leadership isn’t control; it’s surrender.

I can hear you out there saying, “Surrender? I’m not giving up!”, and you shouldn’t. Surrender is not about giving up or giving in; it is about letting go. More specifically, it is about letting go of trying to manage everything so you can appropriately manage the right things.

There are things we should not surrender to. Some leaders surrender to their ego. Egocentric leaders demand to be served instead of serving the people they lead. Similarly, some leaders surrender to the wrong priorities—leading them to make choices that are harmful to their team. It is also possible to surrender to distractive and/or destructive habits. My story of failure and recovery included large helpings of all three of these and resulted in a toxic culture.

My father recently had a heart attack which led to open heart surgery. (Talk about being out of control!) Situations like this require us to have faith in the surgeon and their team as there is not a single thing we can do to control the outcome. Going through this reminded me that we are in control of so few things, yet we often live as if we are. Unfortunately, much of the time we manage to convince ourselves that we are in control, and it robs us of the joy that comes from seeing others fulfill their roles.

While my dad was in surgery, we knew we were not in control. We had to trust the surgeon to do what he was trained to do and what he was responsible for. We had to surrender the outcome. Not give up, surrender. We knew the surgeon was the right person for that job. We knew what was happening and why. We stayed in touch and got updates throughout the procedure. We didn’t follow the surgeon into the operating room and micromanage his team.

Few situations in our leadership roles have outcomes as important as the outcome of that surgery, yet we easily surrendered our egos and let the surgeon take the lead. As leaders, we need to be less concerned with who gets the credit and more concerned with who is the right person to accomplish a task. We need to listen more than we talk (think dialogue instead of monologue). We need to have a growth mindset, which is being willing to learn from others, instead of a closed mindset which leads us to think we are the experts.

Leadership is keeping ourselves in the right context to serve our teams as they create success. Great leaders surrender their egos and their pride so they can distribute responsibility and authority. Great leaders are about exponential multiplication of surrender instead of the addition and subtraction of control. Great leaders aren’t grabbing the handle, they are releasing it to their team in the Bison Way.