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My daughter once asked me if she could drive a friend home from school. Hook? She was a novice driver and we lived in California where it wasn’t allowed.
I quickly realized how tense the situation was. If I gave her permission, I might take responsibility for any problems that arose as a results of her actions. But if I just laid down the law and told her no, she would not learn to think critically about her actions.
Instead of giving my daughter a direct answer, I told her that she needed to consider the potential consequences and make her own decision. I also explained that this made her completely responsible for the consequence and whatever her decision, I might support her.
While I won’t ever share the decision she made that day, she walked away with greater self-awareness and a higher ability to assess risk. A key lesson applies in business too: people are more successful when you encourage them to feel confident in the consequence of their decisions.
Why it is best to remove the approval safety net
As a leader, you can feel safer for everyone when you make vital decisions yourself. But when you give easy answers to worker questions like “Are you OK?” you furthermore mght take something away from them: their agency.
Imagine you have an worker working on a press release. Once it’s gone, there is not any way to get it back. They may ask you if you wish to test it out in advance. However, if you answer yes, the decision is now not theirs – you’ll bear some responsibility for any delays caused by the review process Or any issues that have not been flagged.
Relieving someone of responsibility for their actions is not doing them a favor. At best, it teaches them that failure has no consequences, and at worst, it can teach them that nothing they do makes any difference.
Employees also tend to seek this kind of consent as a form of safeguard, even if they do not realize they’re doing it. However, your corporation will grow much faster and with much greater stability if you as an alternative trust it to pay attention to the results of its selections.
Costs of failure versus costs of weakening
Of course, allowing employees to make their very own decisions and outcomes implies that failure becomes a real risk. However, in many cases, the costs resulting from depriving the team of agency are much greater.
I spotted this truth many years ago when I used to be about to take a leave of absence from work. While I used to be away, we had to make a decision about one of our products, so my boss suggested that I give my engineering manager instructions on what to do. I refused and allow them to make their very own decision.
I explained to my boss that the logic was easy: if they did it the right way, we’d learn that they were more capable than we previously thought and could put their talents to higher use. If they made a bad decision, I might have the opportunity to coach them upon their return to help them understand what they should have done and how.
But if I simply told them what to do, the person would just learn to come to me when a decision needed to be made. This would decelerate decision-making, stagnate growth, and likely eat into future revenues.
Balancing risk and responsibility as a leader
Most importantly, this was a project that might only cost us a few days of wasted work if a bad decision was made and we had to undo it. If this were a larger endeavor with more at stake, leading from the top is likely to be more appropriate.
However, your job as a leader is not to do every little thing yourself. This is to balance the risks of a situation with the opportunities it presents and then provide the appropriate level of guidance.
In most cases, the general rule is easy: the more you have to lose in a given situation, the more practical you most likely ought to be. By reserving learning opportunities for situations that are unlikely to cause catastrophic damage, even if they do occur to go off the rails, you provide your team with a way to grow that does not require taking existential business risks.
Still, allowing people to fail is a mandatory a part of helping them flourish. It helps them build self-confidence, make higher decisions, and increase their responsibilities over time. Ultimately, it also prepares them for leadership roles in the future. Whether you are a parent or a mentor in a skilled setting, this is the kind of role modeling that sets people up for success.