Why can’t you two just work it out?

Two of your best people disagree. Somehow the decision is now yours, and you know less about the problem than either of them. You swallow the question every parent of teenagers knows by heart: "Why can't you two just work it out?"

Some of that really is your job. Much of it is habit.

And the habit has a history.

1980, a cocktail party. Ken Blanchard's wife Margie introduces him to Spencer Johnson, a successful writer of children's books, and tells them: "You two should write a children's book for managers. They won't read anything else." Johnson comes to one of Blanchard's seminars the following Monday. Afterward, by Blanchard's own account, he says: "Forget The One Minute Parent" — the book he was working on at the time — "let's do The One Minute Manager."

I read it a few years later, in my twenties, managing programmers, a young father. I devoured it. Its tools: One Minute Praisings, One Minute Reprimands. Catch people doing something right. Correct them quickly when they don't.

In Search of Excellence arrived the same year. Its message was far more liberating: trust people, give them room, encourage experimentation.

But look closely at some of its language.

"Treat people as adults."

Excellent companies "allowed" their champions "long tethers."

Allowed. Tethers.

This was genuinely progressive compared with command-and-control management. But one assumption remained untouched: management still held the tether.

We became better parents. We didn't necessarily learn to become peers.

You can see the consequence at the top of organizations today. A CFO and a commercial leader disagree on something that belongs to both of them. Each knows far more about the problem than the CEO.

Yet somehow their inability to agree transfers the decision upward.

The CEO chooses. Everyone calls it alignment. And next time, the organization is a little more practiced at sending disagreement upward again.

Some companies solve the bottleneck by creating an appeals committee. But that doesn't remove the parent. It institutionalizes the parent.

Even "empowerment" keeps some of the old grammar: I empower my people to make decisions.

A generous idea. Some of that authority genuinely is the leader's to hold — that's what the role is for. But listen to the assumption folded inside the sentence anyway: that the rest of it was always theirs to give.

The tether got longer. Nobody dropped it.

Peters said: "Treat people as adults."

Here’s my question: Why was their adulthood ever ours to grant?