Ask a Question, Hug a Mistake
May 2nd, 2006[ Office Gossip ]
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.