As we train our leaders, we need to decide whether we’re going to train rules police or people builders. Four key elements will help.

1. Actively manage your recruitment and training to make people-building a priority.

It sounds easy, but few accomplish it. Think through your recruitment process. Who are you aiming to hire? Think through your orientation or your educational programs. What traits and skills are you intentionally looking for? How much of your introduction and training is focused on making sure you encourage everyone to follow policies, and how much is focused on tools to build staff that can be responsible for organizational success now and into the rapidly changing future? The first key is to make your hiring, orientation and training consistent with your desire to build your staff, not just follow rules.

2. Teach the young leaders how to spend their time.

In the September 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review, Birkinshaw and Cohen wrote about helping leaders spend time on what really matters: It’s about both how to organize one’s day as well as teaching the organization’s priorities. The behavior needs to be modeled from the first interaction at application and then followed through their career. Be clear about the organization’s priorities; if you make them guess, don’t be surprised at the chaos in the outcome.

Then, follow up on that training. Take a look at your managers’, supervisors’ or directors’ daily plans. Where do they spend their time? How much of it is spent keeping track of what people are doing versus building people for the next set of challenges?

So many organizations state that their staff are their most valuable asset, and yet they spend most of their time training their leaders to evaluate their staff and how they conform to an ever-expanding set of complex rules. Staff certainly don’t feel valued if their only interaction with rarely seen leaders is when the leader is checking off boxes. In a study by Leadership IQ and reported on in Fast Company, leaders should spend six hours per week connecting with each of the employees they manage. How does that time compare to your leaders’ schedules?

Of course we have tasks to accomplish, but completing prescribed tasks and really accomplishing something (tasks plus building for the future) are much different outcomes. The senior leader’s job is to make sure the rules in place are absolutely necessary and truly serve the higher purpose of the organization and to model the activities that support that purpose.

3. Carefully examine evaluation and promotion activities.

Decide whether they are based on following rules or accomplishing the mission of the organization. Of course, we need to live by the organization’s values, obey the law and have enough structure so people are not confused about their direction. Our responsibility is to give staff and their leaders tools so they can focus on improving the function and well-being of those around them, with following the rules as a necessary but a secondary priority. Following the rules is a tool – an important tool, but never the ultimate goal.

4. Don’t fall into the language of “holding accountable.”

This can be one of our great mistakes in hiring, training and promoting the next generation of leaders. Holding staff accountable is often used as a benchmark for a disciplined high-performance leader. But holding people accountable is always looking backward. It’s retrospective. Being responsible for people’s success is building them for the future. Being responsible for their success is looking forward.

It is not an “either/or.” Excellence will occur when you have a mixture of the two. There needs to be thoughtful consideration among staff and leaders of what was promised and whether it was accomplished. But if we focus hiring, orientation, training and expectations on building their potential (not just checking boxes), we’re much more likely to have engaged, inspired leaders and staff.

Here are four takeaways:

• Start at the time of application and orientation, and continue through training,  evaluation and promotion to value people-building, not just rules management.
• Promote people because of their accomplishments and how they help build for the future … not just for completing prescribed tasks.
• Rules are important tools and pathways but should not be confused as purposes or outcomes.
• “Holding accountable” is looking backward. Being responsible for success is looking forward. Excellence will be a balance of the two, tipped toward being responsible for the continued growth and development of staff.