Thursday, August 6, 2009

Making it Safe For Staff to Discuss Things

I have always believed that the test of a healthy work place is whether or not your staff can talk freely about decisions, offer ideas or improvements etc without fear of retribution. Don't get me wrong here because decisions ave to be made by the leaders and once it has been made the team should adopt it as their own.

I'm talking about robust discussion, input to the big decisions and feeling like they are part of the team to the extent that they can offer ideas or improve current systems in place. After all those actually doing the hands on graft know what works and what doesn't.......this builds on the adage that people are not a business's biggest asset, their skills are!

Here at Results.Com the team are free to challenge me or anyone else and speak freely. This does not come without a need to swallow some pride or eat a bit of humble pie, but it certainly makes for a great culture and adds to the decision making and accountability of the overall team.

Karl

1 comment:

  1. Karl, when you say "Don't get me wrong here because decisions have to be made by the leaders and once it has been made the team should adopt it as their own" do you mean that the leaders are the managers? Or can the leaders be other than managers?

    Perhaps it isn't the manager's job to make the decision but to make sure that the best decision is made.

    One attribute of a best decision is that it is already adopted by the team. There's no "should" about it. Thus the decision has a high probability of being executed effectively.

    Maybe a leader other than the manager can achieve this better than the manager.

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