Dr. Leonard Wong describes lazy leadership as “effort put into building processes to fix a problem rather than trusting your team to fix the problem.”  

Let’s consider on-the-job harassment.  You are experiencing lazy leadership if you are required to complete on-line training designed to combat a symptom such as harassment.  This manner of leadership does not address the culture of the organization.  It instead allows leadership to point to a metric such as “100% completion” when something bad happens. 

Active leadership instead creates a culture of trust in which each team-member understands the mission and the end-state.  And  most importantly, they are then trusted to carry out the mission.  Harassment of any type does not occur in this organization because harassing anyone is culturally unacceptable.   

As leaders, we must work to create a culture of trust in our organization.  We must preach the mission and make clear what we are working towards.  

Will our team members always make the right decision?  No.  However, we as the leader must be willing to be ultimately accountable for the failure and use the failure as a learning experience.  

While we may never be able to change the processes a bureaucratic structure has put in place.  We can, however, take charge of our immediate culture.  We don’t need “100% completion” to be our metric for a well-trained team that does not tolerate harassment of one another.