Do you multiply the intelligence of your team or diminish it?

It’s an elegantly simple idea: leaders can use their intelligence to multiply the intelligence of the people around them and, in doing so, effectively double output . . . for free!

Liz Wiseman describes leaders as either multipliers or diminishers:

Diminishers are leaders so focused on their own ideas and capability that they shut down intelligence around them.
Multipliers are leaders who seem to amplify the intelligence around them.

Multipliers differ in five key areas or disciplines:

• They attract and optimize talent

• They require people’s best thinking

• They extend challenges

• They debate decisions

• They instill accountability

Here is Liz in a very short video describing the big idea behind this thinking.

At the core of a multiplier is the belief that the right people, challenged in the right way, given as much autonomy as they can handle, involved deeply in the decisions that affect them and held accountable for their results will get astonishing things done. Making all that happen is our main role, not figuring out stuff for people.

Diminishers basically believe that they have to figure out everything for everybody else. The thinking goes: “These people will never figure this out without me”. Diminishers tend towards a controlling nature, with plenty of blame thrown in.

Read the book and start making changes!

IBEX Payroll extends our profound respect and immeasurable gratitude to all the ancestors and keepers of the land on whose traditional territories our work takes place. We acknowledge that we are on Treaty 1 territory, the traditional gathering place of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene people and the traditional homeland of the Métis people. This land is sacred, historical, and significant.

Every time we acknowledge this truth, we have an invitation and an opportunity to reflect on the wrongs of the past, what we do in the present, and what we can do to continually honour the people whose lands and water we benefit from today.

This statement only acts as a first step in honouring the land we reside on and its peoples, and must be paired with education, understanding and informed action.