It’s a soapbox day….

You can’t raise a responsible person by not giving them any responsibility. You can’t build a team capable of making intelligent, quality, fiscally responsible decisions if only a small subset of people make decisions for them. Instead of a small subset of a company making the ‘important’ decisions, leaders must ask intelligent questions of their people.

Lead people with questions, not answers. Have faith in them and be willing to accept decisions and answers that differ from your own. It’s far more valuable to the long-term development of an organization to have a company filled with individuals confident in making decisions. The alternative is a group too scared to do anything but sit and wait for their next chance to ask the guy who makes the decisions.

Get excited about wrong decisions and bad news. Encourage individuals to take action, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes quickly and take more action.

View team members who trumpet only good news as red flags. They’re either misrepresenting situations or aren’t comfortable conveying the bad news. This is partly symptomatic of reward systems based on managers having to evaluate their own teams. People hesitate to bring forward the bad news, or they happy-filter it, as it directly impacts their compensation. Bad news exists, even if hidden, and we are in a far better position if we know about it as early as possible.

If leaders punish, frown, whince, or discipline people for making incorrect decisions then you’ll quickly have a group of people taking no meaningful action. Their actions will be the absolute safest, most innocuous path they can think of as they continue in ‘just don’t screw up’ mode. The team will stagnate and innovation won’t exist. Leaders must view mistakes as exciting learning opportunities and drag them out into the daylight.

Even college basketball’s Final Four used this approach.

Seth touches on a similar topic to my recent IT battles post. The key difference being that Seth’s example deals with company policies on how employees interface with their clients. While it’s the same issue, my post used the example of company policies for how employees interface with each other across teams and departments.

Of course I love his idea but the issue is never the idea. In truth, 99% of retail companies out there today would require a major culture shift to even consider this idea. Even that isn’t the real issue though, ideas are cheap, coming up with them is the easy part. What I’m interested in is how do you actually pull this off across a large retail organization?

This is about formalizing the process of questioning standard operating procedures. Shifting your organization from simply doing “what’s in the book” to doing what’s right for the business today. In the real world that has to be balanced with getting things done and not creating a culture where every employee shows up to work with a different idea of how things will run today. The key is building a communications network between those people and getting them comfortable with this topic. Ultimately it’s about asking them the right questions and giving them a forum to discuss it amongst themselves.

Some Links:

• A great article on questioning SOP in the military.
• While I haven’t experienced it first hand, Great Harvest appears to have done an outstanding job of focussing on, and creating, that communication network. They demand that each of their stores are run uniquely and then work on sharing the experiences to allow other owners to learn quickly. They view each of their stores as individually run R&D labs. Quite different from the typical franchise approach where the only decision you get to make is….actually I’m not sure there is one.
• Book: Bread and Butter, What a Bunch of Bakers Taught Me About Business and Happiness