Stop Managing, Start Leading: 4 Brutal Truths You Must Face to Build a Winning Team

Learn in 10 minutes what took me two decades to master.

I was managing. I thought I was leading. Turns out, I was dead wrong.

The path looks straight before we take the first step.

It’s only when we look back at the road we travelled that we see all the curves, twists, and backtracking we took. Learning hits us as we do the work, not before. You can’t plan out your shortest path to leadership beforehand—it’s earned through action.

I’ve learned this lesson the hard way in my chosen profession. I’m a software consultant in the product management arena. It’s definitely an arena, complex and uncertain. You survive based on your agility in the face of changing conditions.

I’m by no means a gladiator of leadership. But I’ve learned a thing or two in my many product contests. I now know what separates high-performing teams from struggling ones.

It’s not best-in-class team members. It’s not the thrill of a compelling product vision. It’s not a manager who knows all the answers.

Behind every great team is an enabling leader. Full stop.

An enabling leader is:

• One who creates conditions for team autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
• One who forms a team with the right mix to own work end-to-end.
• One who removes obstacles the team can’t remove itself.
• One who creates a safe space for learning.

Being a manager does not equate to being a leader.

Yet, managers are around every corner, and enabling leaders are sparse. It’s not uncommon for managers to equal or outnumber the team members. This is true not only in the product space but in all endeavors that I’ve seen.

We are desperate for more leadership and less management.

Without enabling leaders, empowerment is a joke.

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4 Truths You Must Face to Become an Enabling Leader.

Time for some truths.

I’ve consulted at over 70 companies. And I’ve distilled four truths all managers must face to shift and become enabling leaders. These hold true regardless of the company and context. The only prerequisite is the desire to empower a team of humans.

These truths emerged from mistakes I’ve made and messes I’ve seen others make. I learned a way out of my own follies and lent a helping hand to lift others out of theirs.

Now, I want to share these lessons with you.

I hope they give you a leg up in your journey from manager to enabling leader.

Truth 1: You aren’t in control. Let go.

It’s rare these days for anyone to know what to do beforehand, how to do it, and what results to expect.

Yet, managers continue to strive for this unattainable goal.

• They expect initial plans to be executed without variance.
• They create standard operating procedures for all to follow.
• They lock in scope upfront (when knowledge is at its lowest).
• They build specialized roles on teams to execute with precision.
• They create detailed models to predict their return on investments.

It’s not that managers believe they can predict the future. They believe they can bend reality to fit in a nice tidy box. This is where things go awry—we try to control the uncontrollable with structure. My product work profession is a prime example of why control is an unworkable strategy.

• We don’t know our users and their pain.
• We don’t know how long a solution will take.
• We don’t know how much it will cost to build.
• We don’t know what technology snags will surface.
• We don’t know what will solve our users’ problems.
• We don’t know if solving our users’ pain will have a business impact.

It begs a question. Why would we try to act like we can control these things? Yet, managers try to nonetheless.

Trying to contain the unknown and make what is messy by nature appear neat and orderly is a waste of time. It’s a surface-level illusion. Scratch it, and all you get is more surface.

Control, complexity, and uncertainty don’t mix. It’s like trying to predict and control the path of a tornado—impossible and disastrous.

When you lack knowledge, control isn’t the answer. Learning is. And it must be fast and cheap.

Imagine you are walking in total darkness.

Would you sprint and charge ahead blindly? Would you take big steps? Would you know how long it will take you to reach where you are going?

These are silly questions.

Of course, we would take small steps in the dark, adjusting as we go. The path is winding and crooked, not straight and not known.

This mentality is what we need to encourage in our teams as leaders. Small steps. Learning. Adjusting course. Adapting as we go.

Fixing a plan and executing it with precision doesn’t work. Standardization doesn’t work. Bending reality to our will doesn’t work. These behaviors assume we know what to do. We don’t.

As leaders, our actions must match this reality of modern work. Learning can’t coexist with rigid plans and standards. And learning is non-negotiable.

You must embrace change, not control, to become a leader.

Now, on to truth 2 to take the learning onus off you.

Truth 2: You can’t inflict motivation. You can and should build agency.

Inflicting motivation doesn’t breed success, yet managers do it all the time.

It gets used to push agendas by managers who don’t trust teams to try their best. Or they feel teams are incapable of figuring things out on their own. Managers turn to deadlines, directing, and mandating to motivate a team to do what they want.

But it has the opposite effect, spawning a wicked, downward spiral.

1. Morale tanks: Fear of failure, disengagement, and burnout skyrocket.
2. Planning theater takes over: Fake progress replaces evidence-driven strategy and execution.
3. Survival mode sets in: Blame-shifting, risk aversion, and short-term compromise rules. Problem-solving and risk prevention vanish.

Trying to push teams to deliver better, faster, and cheaper. Nothing adds more waste, demotivates more teams, or drives more efforts into the ditch. It steals agency from your teams and turns them into rule followers. Order takers. Robots.

But what you want is teams who can think for themselves to navigate the unknown.

Today’s teams stand on shifting sand. Adaptation must be fast and fluid. They don’t have time to run to a manager and ask for direction. The pivot is up to them. And this is impossible without agency.

A team without agency is like a puppet. A manager who mandates and directs it is the puppet master.

Time to cut the strings.

You aren’t on the ground where teams confront change. You can’t control everything on your own. If you keep a stronghold and dictate (bark orders), you won’t be able to keep pace, and team outcomes will suffer. You become the team bottleneck.

This is disastrous to your career as a manager. Why? Because you can’t control the uncontrollable (remember truth 1). Directing from afar doesn’t work. It’s not a winning move.

Let that sink in.

The agency to adapt in the face of change needs to be with those closest to the work—your teams. The formula for this is simple yet rarely practiced.

My go-to agency-building formula:

1. First, set a goal (a problem to solve) and point your teams in the right direction.
2. Then, treat your employees like the professionals they, are and trust them to get the job done.
3. Let them navigate with autonomy to capture the flag.
   

Managers fear this model. They worry teams will hit a roadblock and not know what to do. Or they fear team members are lazy with ambition only to do the least work necessary to collect a paycheck. This lack of faith makes the manager take control.

But a leader doesn’t do this. They play a crucial role in enabling their team’s success without taking the reins.

This leads us to truth 3 and a big shift you need to make to become an enabling leader.

Truth 3: You aren’t doing the work anymore. You’re clearing the path.

I have a great activity to show how enabling leaders beat controlling managers.

It goes like this:

1. Prep: Put obstacles scattered across the middle of a room—chairs, tables, desks, etc.
2. Round 1: Have half the participants stand at the back of the room. These are the managers. Have the other half stand in front of the managers. These are the employees. The goal is to get the employees to the other side of the room despite the obstacles. Employees can’t take a step or turn to avoid an obstacle unless instructed by the manager in this round. Start a timer. Let the directing and order-taking begin. Stop the timer when the last employee makes it to the other side of the room.
3. Round 2: Have the managers stand with the employees in the back of the room again. But this time the managers don’t direct. They are side by side with the employee. Employees decide where to step. Managers watch their employees’ chosen direction. The manager’s job is to anticipate obstacles and clear the path. Start the timer and let the enabling leadership begin. Stop the timer when the last employee and manager pair reach the other side of the room.
   

Which method do you think is better? Faster? Cheaper? You got it: when a manager clears the path, the team achieves the goal faster, and the employee retains agency. And it’s not a little faster. It’s a lot faster. I’ve seen round 2 finish in seconds versus many minutes for round 1.

Now, imagine if this exercise were your real team. Would you rather control every move they make? Or clear the way so your team can run at full speed? The answer is obvious. So, why do so many managers still lead like they are stuck in Round 1?

An enabling leader removes barriers their employees can’t remove for themselves. They give the employees space to think and act with agency, like the professionals they are.

Autonomous teams with an enabling leader clearing the path just works.

It’s the perfect synchronized team and leader combo.

Truth 4: There’s no silver bullet (ahem…AI). Be patient through the hard work of enabling humans. It’s worth it.

Many times, you have a team whose members have learned helplessness. Managers have told them what to do for so long that they know no other way.

For them to build agency, they must unlearn old habits of following orders. At the same time, they have to learn new behaviors to decide, act, and learn on their own.

This is a slow, arduous process—for the team and the leader. It requires patience and willpower.

Those with a manager mindset hunt for a quick fix.

These days, managers are giving up on the messy human and turning (racing) to AI as a silver bullet. It has the promise of the perfect employee.

They think, “Can an AI agent replace a human?” And many are acting on this pipe dream. It’s all over social media. Mark Zuckerberg said last month he will replace mid-level folks with AI agents in 2025. And he’s not alone. Managers around the world are pursuing a similar quest.

What a mistake to think humans and machines are interchangeable. It comes from a long arc of treating humans like machines.

It’s a mentality that built the pyramids in Egypt. It dehumanized factory workers in the age of Taylor. And now, AI is the ultimate play to solve for the sticky, messy human. AI is efficient, tireless, and precise—qualities sought by every manager.

But AI has a flaw that it can’t overcome. It isn’t human. And it lacks our judgment. Its speed, accuracy, and stamina aren’t enough to replace the human creative spirit on a team. It simply doesn’t have taste. You can’t build rapport or reason with it. It’s a cold machine.

AI wins at speed, precision, and efficiency—but leadership isn’t about any of that. Leadership is about building trust, enabling creativity, and fostering human connections on teams. AI comes up empty with those things.

You can’t be a leader of an AI team.

So, buckle in, enabling leader, for the long haul.

I’ve faced the hard work of building empowered teams many times.

I often inherit teams who are stuck in a factory mode, used to taking orders from managers. I’ve even tried to manage teams and had to backtrack to undo the damage I inflicted. In turn, I learned a few things that helped along the way.

Here’s how I prefer to build empowerment in teams:

1. Model the way. Progress from I do to we do to you do when building team capability to own their own work.
2. Ask questions; don’t give answers. When a team asks you to decide, don’t. Ask questions. Whatever you do, don’t provide the solution. Let them arrive at it. It will give them ownership and help build their problem-solving chops.
3. Help them experiment with safety. Part of this is helping them make small bets. Part of it is encouraging them to take risks. But the most important part is letting them know they are safe to try something unproven.
4. Embrace the messy reality. You have to let them try without interfering, even if they fail. Celebrate failure. When they fail, they learn. One, they learn their experiment didn’t work. And two, they discover they actually have agency to try new things even if they fail.
   

Most of all, be patient. Building team agency takes time. Taking it away happens in an instant.

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It’s hard for a manager not to direct the work. Most managers started as individual contributors. And many enjoyed it. It’s an itch that’s almost impossible not to scratch.

But if you can overcome the urge, you will build powerful teams that can think on their own. For me, the above truths were essential to learn. I hope they can help you, too.

1. Give up trying to control complexity and uncertainty.
2. Build teams with agency to decide and act on their own.
3. Clear obstacles from your team’s path before they become blockers.
4. Don’t hunt for a quick fix, and be patient while building your team up.
   

Leadership isn’t about knowing all the answers—it’s about asking the right questions. So here’s mine for you: Which of these truths hits home the most? Have you had to let go of control, build agency, or clear the path for your team? Let’s discuss—drop your thoughts below.

Good luck out there, enabling leaders, as you build team agency and reap the rewards.

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