When my niece Fiona was four, she began to resist getting dressed and rejected any outfit her mother selected. My sister-in-law then started to offer her daughter a choice for each type of clothingi.e., a choice between these two shirts and then a choice between these two pants, etc. It worked beautifully: Fiona began to dress quickly and without resistance.Offering options helps parents move their kids through daily life because choice offers a sense of autonomy instead of force and pressure. Choice offers what childhood experts call high autonomy support.Offering a choice is not only effective as a parent, but it is also a key to being an inspiring leader.To understand the power of choice, lets consider the everyday yet stressful situation of buying a car. Lets say you are looking to purchase a new Toyota RAV4 and the salesperson offers you one in your favorite color for $34,875 with a three-year warranty. How would you feel about the price, the salesperson, and the experience?Now imagine the salesperson had offered you the same car but for $35,875 with a five-year warranty. Does that change your reaction?Okay, lets consider a third scenario. The salesperson offers you a choice of both options: I can offer you RAV4 Premium in your favorite color for either $34,875 with a three-year warranty or $35,875 with a five-year warranty. Now how do you feel?At one level you should feel the same as the choice offers the same options as the individual ones. But receiving a choice changes everything. Why is offering a choice so inspiring? Because the dealer is asking for your preferences.From the dealers perspective, the two offers are equal in value, where each additional year of warranty is worth about $500. But the dealer is letting you decide how much each year of warranty is worth to you. Offering a choice gives others a sense of autonomy. When we offer a choice, we are treating others as people and not as objects.My research with Geoffrey Leonardelli of the University of Toronto shows just how powerful offering a choice is. In our studies, receiving a choice made our participants feel that the choice was a genuine and sincere attempt to truly understand and accommodate their interests. It turned potentially contentious situations into cooperative ones by making the receiver feel seen and understood.What is particularly interesting is that offering a choice also changed how the receiver viewed the person making the offer. Without choice, our participants viewed the offer with suspicion and were wary of any offer they received. But when they received a choice, they saw the offerer as not only more flexible but also more trustworthy.In contrast to the feelings of freedom that come from receiving choice, being micromanaged is infuriating. I frequently hear this refrain: My leader drove me crazy because they micromanaged everything I did.We hate it when our bosses are constantly looking over our shoulders. When we micromanage, we are signaling we dont trust or believe in the other person. It feels demeaning and disrespectful.Rather than interjecting ourselves in our employees activities, we can do the reverse. We can delegate important assignments or invite others into influential meetings. Delegating advanced tasks feels so inspiring because it says, I trust you and I believe in you. Because it feels like a developmental leap in responsibility, it activates our inner conscientiousness.Inviting someone to join a high-level meeting activates the wonder of a child entering new spaces. When we offer responsibility and invite involvement, we inspire people to live up to our faith in them. We inspire people to meet the moment.Involvement fundamentally changes how we approach a task. It moves us from the sidelines onto the field. We go from disengaged observers to active participants.Thats how Renee LaRoche-Morris felt when she was given a seat at the table during a critical meeting. Long before she became the chief financial officer of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Renee was working at a consulting firm. Going into an important meeting, she was told to sit against the wall and only observe the discussion among 30 senior leaders of a bank and their important clients. One of the clients motioned Renee to come join the table, but she resisted; she wasnt supposed to be part of the discussion.But the man wouldnt give up, and eventually Renee relented. As she sat down, her boss looked horrified, his eyes infuriatingly saying, What are you doing, why are you at the table? That disapproving boss wouldnt stay her boss for long.Soon after that meeting, the client reached out to ask Renee to help him on a deal. And a short time after that, that client asked her to come work for him. A simple invitation to sit at the table created one of Renees longest and most important professional relationships.Sherry Wu of the University of California at Los Angeles has conducted numerous field studies showing that involvement is truly inspiring. In her experiments, she goes into organizations and randomly assigns work groups, from factory workers to administrative staff, to either a baseline group or a high-involvement group. In the baseline condition, the leader runs their twenty-minute weekly meeting as they always have. But in her high-involvement condition, the supervisor steps aside and the workers lead the discussion of goals, challenges, and new ideas.This little bit of participationjust twenty minutes a weekis transformative. Not only does high involvement boost productivity, but it also increases satisfaction and reduces quitting. And Sherry finds that these effects occur because active participation fulfills the fundamental need for control.Samantha Shapses, the dean of students at Columbia Business School, follows this model: a different member of her staff leads her teams weekly meeting on a rotational basis. And this is how I run my doctoral seminars: every week a different student leads the classdiscussion.Consistent with Sherrys research, Samantha finds it creates a more engaged team, and I find it produces more active learners. Involving others and offering them choices provides people with a sense of autonomy and control. At the same time, giving people too much autonomy can make them feel unmoored and adrift. Thats why involving others and offering them choices are so powerful: They give people a sense of autonomy within a sense of structure.This is an adapted excerptfromInspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Othersby Adam Galinsky (Harper Business, 2025).