Education or Legislation

Are you an educator or a legislator? I ask because I have worked with 2 leaders who had a very different approach to leadership: one was a legislator and the other an educator. The legislator relied on a rigid set of rules to lead his team; these rules were rigid and very prescriptive and dealt with all sorts of minutiae, there was even a rule – and I’m not joking here – that directed the team…to follow all the other rules!

This leader’s answer to all problems and to try to improve performance was to invent yet more rules; indeed there were so many rules that by following one rule the team was likely to be breaking others. In contrast another leader’s approach was to train and educate the team and by doing so they allowed the team to evolve and improve and encouraged original thought and new ideas. The question is…which leader would you rather work for?