As a municipal leader, you are involved in a demanding budget squeeze during a few hectic autumn weeks. When politicians adopt the budgets for the following year in mid-December, it is the result of extensive processes and tough priorities.

Many people have opinions about how resources should be used to meet a growing need for services. An important realization is that increasing control and bureaucracy is not the way to go to create development and good solutions for the citizens of the municipality. To achieve good solutions, you must replace control and bureaucracy with involvement where you give employees the space to find good solutions in collaboration with the citizen.

Leaders who purposefully work to utilize their room for maneuver seem to succeed the most.

Here are some experiences that you, as a leader, can safely build your leadership on to get the room for action you need to succeed:

· Trust is something you deserve, and control is something you get
· Psychological security makes you dare more
· Good goals are crucial for developing good solutions
· Many small victories often trump one rare triumph

Trust is something you deserve, control is something you get.

Trust is increasingly seen as an indicator of how well a society functions. In the workplace and in all other interpersonal relationships, a high level of trust is an indicator that the rules of the game are perceived as reasonable and appropriate. You are given trust, you have trust, but you cannot demand it. As a leader, you are expected to exercise power and authority by virtue of your position so that the organization achieves its goals in a responsible and ethical manner.

As a leader, you are expected to be able to show that you have control and can provide clear answers when political leadership asks questions about matters that are of great importance for the implementation of political decisions. By virtue of your role as a leader, you are assigned authority and responsibility, but this does not necessarily mean control. You gain control through your employees. You are therefore in a relationship of dependence. How can you build this relationship of dependence so that you experience control and exercise leadership without your employees feeling controlled?

Psychological security makes you dare more!

Solving tasks in collaboration with others can be challenging. Psychological safety is about having a culture where you feel free to speak your mind, where asking for help is a good thing, and where you can make mistakes without being laughed at.

As a leader, you are expected to take the lead and help create psychological safety. This is crucial for your employees' motivation, learning, and performance.

Amy Edmondson shows in extensive studies that security in relationships creates confident individuals, who dare to participate by expressing how they see the world. This in turn will create a learning culture – which is central to the group's ability to be creative and innovative.

There is a clear correlation between perceived psychological safety in groups and these characteristics:

• If I make a mistake, it won't be used against me.
• It is easy to raise problems and difficult topics
• It is accepted that we are different.
• It's safe to take risks.
• It is safe to ask others for help.
• No one will intentionally act in a way that would undermine my efforts.
• Expertise and special skills are valued and utilized

If you lead in a way that makes your employees feel psychologically safe, you build trust. This also leads to progress, increased goal achievement and good results!

Good goals are crucial for developing good solutions!

Goals point forward, they are something to be achieved. But getting there is teamwork, so now it's time to use the trust and psychological security you've built up to build and develop management processes that make it possible to achieve the goals!

To achieve this, as a leader, you must create support for the goals. Your job is to communicate them and invite employees to contribute! When you create support for the goals and provide freedom on the way to them, you are a wise leader!

In his book Results Management, John-Erik Stenberg has emphasized the importance of processes that are based on involvement, commitment and personal effort among managers and employees. Leadership built on commitment to the goal and freedom to choose the means appeals strongly to well-qualified and competent employees.

Many small victories often trump a rare triumph!

Have you known the immense satisfaction of winning small victories – often? Our experience is that this is one of the strongest motivational factors for you as a leader and your employees. 

When we think of progress, we often imagine how good it feels to achieve a long-term goal or experience a major breakthrough. These gains are big but relatively rare.

The good news is that even small gains can greatly increase job satisfaction and productivity! Teresa Amabile (The Progress Principle 2011) has documented through extensive research that what has the greatest significance in everyday work is the experience of progress when you perform meaningful work tasks.

In summary

We started this article with the idea that when the budget process is over, you have implicitly made a plan for what the resources will be used for. Your responsibility is to meet the expectations of good services for the citizen and development opportunities for the employees. As a manager, you are responsible for ensuring that the room for action is utilized to the fullest. In this post, we have chosen to focus on some key prerequisites for making this happen.

Confident and courageous leaders instill confidence and courage in their employees. Good processes built on involvement, commitment and personal effort give you a good foundation for developing the room for action you need to solve demanding tasks.