Gaining control

Of course I said our motivation is aimed at gaining control in a cooperative way. This is true because this it has evolutional advantages. If you want to know more about this you should read the treatise about the prisoner's dilemma. But what can be an advantage to a group as a whole must not necessarily be of an advantage for every single individuum.

But what about the other choice we have? This seems to be a more common way in our competetive society. According to Tom DeMarco I call this the spanish method.
 

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The spaniard thought that wealth is a limited resource in the world. If you want to become rich, you have to take the wealth of other people away. So they robbed gold from the incas and transported it to their own country, where all this gold caused an inflation that collapsed their economy. This was the main reason their empire broke down. The englishman thought that wealth is archieved by cleverness, and that wealth can grow. They took over the world from the spaniard (I know this is a bit simplified).

Their is another common theory that control is a limited resource, too. That you have to limit the control that other people have about their lives to gain more control about yours.

This I call the spanish method: a false thinking about control. Quite a few managers have this false theory in mind. They know that they have to build teams to archieve their goals, but if this team becomes too powerfull the will try to take some of this power for their own. If this fails, they will destroy the team (by taking it apart). They will only hire people that are no threat to their own goal of becoming more powerfull - and these people have to be inferior to their own abilities.

This way they won't build a good team. Or they will de-motivate the team to make themselves look stronger. In the end, everyone looses: the team, because they can't archieve their goal, the company because the company won't get a team that is powerfull enough to do something outstanding. Of course the manager will blame the team for his own failure, but he may survive and will continue to build weak teams.

If a manager is afraid of giving up some of his power because of this fear he has been fallen to the spanish method.

Stay away from this type of manager.

Cooperation is a much more powerfull source for gaining control. Of course you have to give up some control, but in the end you will gain more than you gave up. This way, everybody wins.

Giving up control in favour of cooperation will create a win-win situation (not every time, but most of the time), whereas the spanish method will create a loose-loose situation (most of the time).