When someone asks me, What is the importance of maturity in the workplace? My response is that it is crucially important. It is so important in fact that cultivating mature people is one of the key leadership challenges. In fact, if a leader is not deliberately cultivating and rewarding maturity in his people, he is not actually being a leader. Mature people should be a leader’s key deliverable.
There are a couple of things I need to say in support of this idea. The first is that it is a requirement of leadership that you get people to do things. The easiest way to get people to do things is to dangle the carrot in from of them, or when that doesn’t work, wag the stick at them. There is another way which is much more effective than either compulsion or persuasion but it is much more difficult to achieve. This other way is about unlocking the willingness of people, it is about reaching the point where they want to do what you ask them to do.
This willingness is actually a matter of maturity. Maturity really is about being someone who is more concerned about making a contribution than about getting stuff. When it comes to leading people there are really two things to bear in mind:
1: Do my people have the capacity to do what is required of them?
2: Are they willing to do what is required of them on their own account, or do I need to consistently make them do it?
Intelligence, expertise, resources, etc. are relevant in relation to the first question. Maturity is relevant for the second question.
Leadership then is very much about cultivating people who are willing to make the contribution required of them without having to be constantly compelled or persuaded to do so. This is actually about cultivating people who are willing to take accountability for their deliverables to the company or group. Put simply, leadership is really about cultivating people who are mature enough to take full accountability for their own contribution.
This idea of accountability is actually very important. It is not enough for a leader to stop at question one, i.e. it is not enough for a leader simply to make sure his people have the means and ability to make the contribution. Just giving the means and ability does not guarantee that the person will make the contribution. To make sure they will make the contribution you need to give them a reason to take ownership of the contribution they need to be making. You have to cultivate the required level of maturity in them.
How do you do this? How you achieve this is by holding them accountable for the contribution they are meant to be making. If they drop the ball, or worse yet, deliberately mishandle it, the consequences for that must fall on their shoulders. When a leader does this she is essentially saying,”I am not going to hold your hand here, you need to be mature enough to own this.”
Of course there are things the leader needs to get right before she is actually in a position to say this to her people. Mature, accountable people should actually be the product of an empowerment process which starts at identifying the unique contribution the person should be making, and ends with them as being fully accountable for making that contribution. In my next article I will talk about this empowerment process and the fundamental condition that needs to be met in order for this process to be legitimate.
For now I end with what I started: The essence of the leadership challenge is about cultivating mature people because it is only mature people who can take charge of their own contributions. They make their contributions willingly, not because someone is compelling or persuading them to do so.