Who Needs Who

I work the first three Steps every day (well, maybe several times a day). Today, I find myself powerless over something. It’s making me crazy, but a Power greater than I can restore my sanity. I decide to turn my will and life (and this stupid situation) over to God. Problem solved. Well, not really, but at least I have a shot at peace and serenity.

As leaders, we sometimes think everyone needs us. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The words we use for work relationships didn’t appear out of nowhere. They emerged during the Industrial Revolution when factories needed a way to organize masses of people around machines. Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” treated humans like components to be optimized. Workers were literally called “hands”—not people, just the useful parts. Management existed to control labor. Labor existed to produce output. The vocabulary itself embedded a power structure: some people think and plan, others simply execute.

This language gave leaders the illusion of control. If I’m managing labor, then I’m in charge. I make decisions; they follow them. I have the power; they’re expected to depend on me. The whole framework suggests a one-way relationship: workers need managers to tell them what to do, and managers need workers to do what they’re told.

It’s a tidy system. It’s also completely insane if you actually want to lead people.

The truth is simpler and more challenging.

People need people. That’s it.

We’re interdependent beings who accomplish more together than apart. Where leadership must exist—and it must, because someone needs to hold vision and make decisions—people deserve good ones. They deserve leaders who understand the relationship is mutual, not hierarchical, and who recognize they need their people more than their people need them.

Here’s what recovery taught me that management theory never could: I am powerless over people. Not just powerless over their choices or their performance—powerless over them, period. I cannot control another human being any more than I could control my addiction. Every attempt to do so makes me crazier and damages the relationship I’m trying to force.

Step One isn’t just about substances or behaviors. It’s about admitting I’m powerless over anything outside myself, including the people I work with. Step Two reminds me that sanity comes from something greater than my need to control outcomes. Step Three is the daily surrender of my will—including my will to manage, manipulate, or make people do what I think they should do.

The vocabulary of management reveals our desire for control. The vocabulary of labor reveals our willingness to dehumanize. Both betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what is actually happening in healthy work relationships.

What those old factory models never grasped is that leaders exist because people allow them to. Every single day, the people on your team make a choice to show up, engage, contribute, or not. You’re not controlling that. You never were. You’re participating in a relationship where your role is to serve their ability to do great work, and their role is to bring their best to something bigger than themselves.

This isn’t just semantics. Language shapes how we think, and how we think shapes how we lead. If I see myself as managing labor, I’ll focus on control, compliance, and output. If I see myself as being in relationship with people, I’ll focus on trust, mutual benefit, and creating conditions where we all do our best work.

The practical shift isn’t complicated, but it requires surrender.

Stop trying to manage people—start building genuine relationships with them.

Stop seeing yourself as the one with power over others—start seeing yourself as someone who needs good people and should be worthy of them choosing to work with you.

Rethink your language. What you call people matters. Are they your team, or your labor? Are you their leader, or their manager? Words create reality.

Rethink your relationships. Are you trying to control outcomes through people or create conditions where people can thrive? One makes you crazy. The other might lead to something resembling sanity.

I can’t control the situation that’s driving me nuts today. I can’t manage my way out of it or force people to solve it the way I think they should. What I can do is show up in honest relationship, admit my powerlessness, trust something bigger than my need for control, and surrender my will to what’s actually true: we’re all in this together, and we all need each other. That’s a lot harder than the old management model, but it’s the only way that actually works—the Bison Way.