I remember when I got my first “real” job in my field. I was ambitious and excited to make a contribution. I understood I was the low man on the totem pole, but I believed that hard work and good ideas could get me to the top.
Never did I imagine some of the pettiness, monotony, groupthink, backstabbing, lowest-common-denominator nonsense that I would encounter throughout my career.
That’s because none of us starts our careers expecting to become cogs in a misfiring machine. We begin with hope, conviction, and a belief that we’re going to do work we enjoy. And yet, at some point (a matter of WHEN not IF) we come face to face with a workplace in which these fine characteristics begin to erode.
It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s gradual. Then, like the Hemingway quote from last week’s newsletter, one day we wake up and we’ve reached the end of our rope.
Our Sovereignty at Work
One of my core beliefs as a person and as a worker is in the absolute necessity of being able to operate with integrity and agency. Integrity meaning that my actions align with my principles. Agency meaning that I believe that what I do matters and that I can—and should—have impact. Combined, they form what I call one’s individual sovereignty.
Our sovereignty can be injured—like when we are asked to cut corners, or to act for expediency rather than doing what we know is right and necessary. It is even more deeply wounded when we stop believing that our decisions or our efforts matter, so often inflicted by the actions of timid and self-serving people in positions of power.
Over time, the damage reaches a tipping point where, instead of acting in the service of what’s best, we simply look for what’s minimally acceptable. We become resentful. We stop trying.
This is a huge problem, especially in operational teams. A team without sovereignty is a team that is no longer curious, that no longer exhibits real ownership nor challenges the status quo. It is a team that sees the problems and yet never builds solutions.
As a leader, you can still get a tune out of people in an injured state, but it is enormously difficult. The solution, even if your team is only one small part of the company, is to help them build that sovereignty back up.
Promoting Sovereignty
There are many ways to act in service of promoting individual sovereignty at work, but none of them speaks louder than good delegation. Good delegation means not just pushing work down, but giving people **the ability to decide how that work gets done. It means allowing them—even encouraging them—to challenge the status quo.
And most of all, it means not undermining them. It’s rarely the case that we overtly undermine our team members. But it’s often the case where we allow situational realities to constrain the field of acceptable action. For it is these situations, justified or not, where we know we could have done better.
This isn’t about chasing perfection. It’s about countering the impact of human frailties (fear, envy, ego, and vulnerability) in the workplace that lead people to see work as a zero-sum battlefield, where your win is my loss.
As leaders, we have a responsibility to push back against this, however hard it may be. That starts with each of us acting like grown-ups, acting with reciprocity, and exhibiting trust with our teams—and then promoting these behaviors across the company.
When we do this, we recover a sense of ownership and ambition to do great work. We reverse the slow surrender. We help people reclaim their sovereignty. And that is the work of great leadership.