From Directing to Enabling

Leadership that lifts, not limits.

"Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge." ¹

Traditional management approaches often prioritize oversight and direction. The manager assigns work, monitors performance, and ensures delivery against a defined plan. This model was well-suited to industrial-age systems built around repeatable tasks and predictable outcomes. But today's Agile environments demand something different. They thrive on adaptation, learning, and shared ownership. To support this, leaders must shift from directing the work to enabling the people who do it.

The core of this shift is not about relinquishing responsibility. It's about transforming the nature of leadership from controlling decisions to creating an ecosystem where high-performing teams can emerge. Enabling leaders focus on environment over instruction, clarity over command, and outcomes over outputs. They cultivate the conditions for others to lead.

What It Looks Like in Practice

In a directed environment, managers are the decision-makers. They determine what needs to be done, assign the work, and follow up to ensure execution. Problems often flow up the hierarchy for resolution, and autonomy is limited by the need for permission.

In an enabling environment, the flow of initiative reverses. Leaders work to ensure that teams understand the purpose behind the work. They remove structural obstacles, share access to data, encourage experimentation, and trust the team to choose how to meet shared goals.

You might see it in action when a tech lead invites the team to define its own Definition of Done, or when a program manager encourages developers to attend user interviews instead of sending a proxy. It might show up when leadership stops holding status meetings and instead helps teams build visualizations of their own work in progress. These are small shifts, but together they rewire team dynamics from dependency to ownership.

Origins and Theoretical Foundations

This pattern has its roots in humanistic management theories dating back to Douglas McGregor's Theory Y,² which emphasized trust in people's intrinsic motivation and ability to self-direct when given the right context. Later, Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership³ reframed leadership as an act of service, putting the development of people at the center.

Modern Agile methods took these principles and encoded them into roles and structures. Scrum's Scrum Master supports rather than commands. Kanban explicitly calls for leadership at all levels. Even SAFe, often seen as hierarchical, places emphasis on decentralized decision-making and lean leadership behaviors. Across these approaches, the principle holds: people do their best work not when tightly controlled, but when deeply trusted.

Starting the Journey

The shift from directing to enabling doesn't happen all at once. It's not a binary switch, but a progression. Leaders can begin by making small, deliberate changes in how they show up.

Start by asking questions instead of offering solutions. When a team brings a problem, resist the urge to fix it. Instead, ask what they've tried or what options they've considered. Shift one meeting from a status report to a shared working session. Give a team the freedom to select their own metrics for success on a small project. These incremental moves signal trust and create space for self-direction to grow.

It can also help to make these experiments visible. Talk openly about your intent to support autonomy. Invite feedback from the team on what kind of support is helpful and what feels like micromanagement. This helps build a feedback loop around leadership behavior itself.

Case Study: Enabling in Action

At a large financial services firm, an infrastructure team struggled with delivery delays. The manager typically assigned work based on ticket queues and escalated blockers up the chain. After moving toward enabling behaviors, the manager stopped distributing tasks and began facilitating weekly goal-setting meetings where the team identified and prioritized its own work. They also created a shared board that made impediments visible and encouraged ownership of removing them.

Within three months, resolution times dropped by 40 percent, and team members reported a stronger sense of purpose and connection. No one asked for permission to act anymore. They acted, and aligned with each other through clear goals and open communication.

Differentiated Application

Enabling doesn't look the same everywhere. For mission-critical teams, like those managing hospital systems or air traffic control, enabling might mean building tightly defined boundaries within which teams still make decisions. These teams may rely on pre-approved fallback procedures or escalation paths to reduce uncertainty while retaining some autonomy.

In contrast, teams working on experimental features or innovation portfolios benefit from broader autonomy and greater tolerance for uncertainty. Here, enabling may focus on reducing fear of failure and encouraging divergent thinking. Leaders in these spaces often act as sponsors for learning, shielding teams from premature convergence.

The context matters. Enabling isn't a free-for-all. It's the art of applying the right degree of freedom based on risk, clarity, and the team's maturity.

Enabling at Scale

Scaling enabling leadership requires more than personal transformation. It demands structural support. When only a few leaders adopt enabling mindsets, the culture remains brittle. But when the system reinforces these behaviors, they take root.

This might involve shifting performance metrics from individual completion to team outcomes. It may include investing in peer mentorship rather than hierarchy-based approvals. Agile programs can redesign roles to promote facilitation over authority. For example, in SAFe or LeSS environments, coordination layers like Release Train Engineers or Area Product Owners can amplify enabling leadership by coaching others and sharing decision-making frameworks.

Enabling at scale also means aligning HR, finance, and governance models with Agile principles. Otherwise, teams may get conflicting signals about what's truly valued.

Implementation Considerations

A practical entry point for this shift is self-assessment. Leaders can reflect on their behaviors by asking:

• How often do I make decisions the team could make for itself?
• What structures encourage people to rely on me, rather than on each other?
• Do I spend more time in 1:1 updates or in group discovery?

Based on this reflection, leaders can track progress by identifying enabling behaviors they want to grow. Some organizations use 360 feedback, peer coaching circles, or leadership Kanban boards to make these behaviors visible and deliberate. The goal isn't perfection. It's directional change, tracked over time.

Common Resistance Patterns

Resistance to enabling leadership often stems from fear, habit, or unclear expectations. Leaders may worry about becoming irrelevant, losing control, or being blamed if something goes wrong. Many have been rewarded for decisiveness and direction throughout their careers, so shifting to a posture of facilitation can feel like abandoning their identity or value.

On the team side, resistance may show up as hesitation to take initiative or fear of overstepping. When teams are used to permission-based cultures, sudden autonomy can feel unsafe or confusing. Even subtle cues, like clinging to status reports, relying heavily on manager approvals, or defaulting to escalation, can indicate that the shift hasn't fully taken root.

Sometimes resistance is framed as a concern for accountability. Leaders may argue that enabling undermines clarity or increases risk. But in practice, enabling doesn't eliminate accountability. It distributes and clarifies it. These concerns often reflect a lack of shared understanding about what success and ownership really look like in Agile systems.

The most effective way to address resistance is to name it. When leaders acknowledge the discomfort, share their intent, and invite others into the transition, they create a more open pathway for change. Teams don't need perfection. They need to see consistency, care, and the willingness to grow together.

Key Takeaways

• Enabling leadership replaces control with support, direction with conditions for growth.
• The shift is gradual, starting with small behavioral experiments.
• The enabling mindset varies by team maturity, risk context, and mission type.
• Scaling requires systemic alignment across roles, metrics, and policies.
• Resistance is normal and can be navigated through reflection and coaching.

Summary

The shift from directing to enabling invites leaders to let go of certainty and control in favor of trust and capability. It's not about stepping back. It's about stepping into a new kind of presence, one that values learning, autonomy, and shared success. When leaders embrace this role, teams grow stronger, problems get solved closer to the source, and organizations become more adaptive. Enabling is a mindset, a skillset, and a practice. It starts with one decision at a time.