Photo Credit: Ford Motor Company

From 2006-2014, Ford Motor Company went from near bankruptcy and record losses of almost $12 billion to become a frontrunning car company with $6 billion in profits.

How’d it happen?

To be sure, many things made this turnaround. And certainly Alan Malally had a lot to do with it.

In 2006 he made the jump from Boeing, where he had led the 777 program, to become CEO at Ford. While many executives would have shied away from such a tangled financial mess and a troubled industry, Malally jumped at the chance.

Malally knew he had to define a compelling vision and a clear plan for Ford, but he also knew better than to make it about what only he wanted to accomplish.

“It’s not about the CEO’s vision alone,” he recently said to CEO Magazine. “It’s about creating a culture where everyone is working together for the greater good.”

He says leaders must “move from ‘I’ to ‘we’ and from ‘we’ to ‘service.’”

Among the scores of companies going through change that I’ve studied over the years, most failed and a few succeeded. Perhaps the biggest enabler of change—and the biggest drawback—had to do with whether the change was top-driven or shared.

As I’ve said before, I’ve uncovered the reason for this: Leaders are great problem solvers. We get promoted for being good at solving problems. When we see a need for change, it’s in our nature to solve the problem—and hand it down to everyone.

This makes it the leader’s change, not everyone’s.

What Malally understood—what he proved—is that a shared vision creates shared rowing, shared passion, shared excitement, shared hard work, shared commitment.

Here’s to all of us remembering this the next time we’re tempted to solve a problem on our own, instead of sharing at least some of the problem-solving duties with the team.

Let me know what you think. I look forward to being in touch.

Al