Imagine you are driving a bus. Are your eyes on the road ahead of you? Are your hands firmly on the wheel? Are you focused on the road with a clear map of how to reach your destination?
Or, are you looking in the rear view mirror constantly to see what’s going on in the back of the bus or even worse turning back to check?
Most of you are probably familiar with the proverbial bus metaphor and “getting the right people on the bus” when it comes to making sure your team is well staffed and comprised of the right personnel. Driving forward while looking backwards can be dangerous; both in actual driving situations and when you’re trying to pilot your company. Pulling over to check on what’s happening between your passengers or with your team can stall progress and has a significant opportunity cost. In a small team, hiring someone to supervise or babysit the folks at the back is an additional expense and you run the risk of them not being in sync with you.
In order to create a culture for employee engagement—a key ingredient for both productivity and loyalty—it is important to empower your people, which can only happen if you are able to trust them. Trust, in my opinion, is built on a foundation of technical competence and good judgment—job skills and judgment skills. While it can be assumed that you will hire technically competent people, it is critical to train the team members in judgment and choice-making skills, disciplines that are typically not taught in schools.
Assessing an applicant’s technical competence can be done more effectively than evaluating their judgment skills during the hiring process. Until you observe someone for a period of time, it is difficult to evaluate their ability to exercise good judgment and make wise choices. While a large amount of attention is paid to leadership training, I strongly believe in raising the bar across the board in terms of the ability to make good decisions. This can lead to overarching positive outcomes for the firm.
I learned this lesson early in my very first company, Visual Symphony, an online multimedia learning developer in the early 90s. Since we were pioneering new applications with digital video, I hired some amazingly skilled people to join my team. While they were technically exceptional, some of them would exercise very poor judgment both in their professional and personal lives. In fact, my wife and I had to bail one of them out of jail on a late night.
The problem is that individuals and organizations overemphasize certain aspects of performance and leadership development while overlooking the value and impact of cultivating a basic choice-making skillset aligned with defined core values. Interestingly, leaders and managers don’t carefully track a large part of their time that they spend shepherding and monitoring those who work for them, instead of focusing on the bigger picture and forging ahead.
The Journal of Leadership Studies recently concluded that the more a company focuses on internal leadership growth, the better its sales, profits and profit margins become. However, are these companies focusing on the right things when they turn their sights solely to the development of traditional leadership traits within their organization? I don’t believe so.
There is a difference between real leadership and mere supervision. It can be easy to mistake supervision for leadership at face value, and vice versa. With the competitive global business environment dictating the speed at which we conduct business and engage with others, leaders must be able to focus their energy and attention toward growth and innovation. Supervising basic employee tasks and day-to-day activities should not have to be one of their top priorities. They need to be able to trust those around them without having to hold their hands to directly lead them to success. Additionally, these leaders need the headspace to focus on new and higher goals for themselves.
If a leader is spending all of their time and energy resolving conflicts between team members, or showing their coworkers the exact way to make all decisions, they are not leading at all—they are merely babysitting. Bono, a well-known Irish musician and philanthropist, once told Fortune: “Real leadership is when everyone else feels in charge.” This is not to suggest, though, that everyone needs to feel in charge of the entire organization, or in charge of one another. In many cases, it is enough that employees, both leaders and subordinates, feel in charge of themselves. From this comes a greater sense of accountability and motivation to propel oneself towards success, without needing a push from someone else. The only way to become a true leader is by reducing the time you spend in supervision.
The only way to reduce supervision is by increasing the choice-making competency at every level of an organization.
Instead of only providing ‘leadership training’ that harps on supervisory skills and managerial techniques to chosen candidates, organizations should consider providing training and education in the skills of conscious judgment and values-centered choice-making to everyone in an organization. Effective training that goes beyond traditional job skills and procedures can realign priorities, increase job satisfaction and enhance productivity. This type of education can elevate people at every level of an organization.
A way to better appreciate this philosophy is to understand the role and impactof every position in an organization. For example, I have seen in my experience that very few people pay attention to the receptionist position; these employees are often also paid significantly less than other coworkers. However, the receptionist truly is, in many cases, the voice of the company. A caller’s first touch point with a company is through the receptionist, especially in service-oriented organizations. The way that a person on the other end of the phone line is treated can either act as the starting impetus of a relationship or end it in the blink of an eye.
In one of the companies where I worked as the Chief Operating Officer, I realized early the importance of this position since most of our top clients called us over the telephone. So, I interviewed over 72 candidates for the receptionist position. The primary screening, instead of relying on a candidate’s resume was my choice to make a phone call. While on paper, they may have had all the proper skills to do the job, it was their impression during that phone call that determined whether or not they had what it took to make the cut.
As a society, we are quick to accept that our successes are a direct consequence of our choices. It should stand to reason, then, that time and effort should be invested into making sure that people on every rung of the corporate ladder know how to approach these choices with clear focus and deliberation. Not only are judgment and choice-making teachable skills, they are vital competencies. In the modern knowledge economy, the ability to innovate and improvise can generate huge rewards. Real leaders will develop every level of employee to a mindset that increases a team’s basic judgment skills and effectiveness at the individual level.
The key to success is not in teaching leaders how to steer or clean up accidents, but in teaching the entire organization how to avoid crashes in the first place.
