What's Wrong with Work?

What does participative decision-making mean?

When we encourage teams to participate in debate and discussion rather than expecting the leader to make all the decisions alone, we often get resistance to the idea. 

"It will be like decision-making by committee" is the most common response. 

The misconception is that participation means a majority vote. Leaders assume that because they are asking people for their opinion, they will also be delegating decision-making. 

Of course, it is appropriate, sometimes, to vote and the majority wins.

Equally it may be appropriate sometimes to vote to test out how popular an idea is and discover where opinions lie but not to use voting as the way to make the final decision.

At other times it may be appropriate to gather opinions and ideas but then leave the manager to make the final call.

When everything is put to the vote you might well wonder what the leader's job is. When leaders are able to judge which decisions are best left to the majority, which decisions they should stick away from altogether and which decisions they need to make having gathered opinions and ideas, they demonstrate true leadership - the ability to flex their style to suit the requirements of the situation.

Rather than being afraid to ask for input and participation because it may imply decision by committee, encourage input and participation knowing that, in the end, the buck may have to stop with you.  

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If you had to put your values in order...

Disneyworld has four quality standards, a bit like organisational values. Nothing new there, most organisations today do. But what I find interesting about theirs is that they prioritise them. 

So often in organisations staff are expected to balance the differing and often conflicting values meaning they choose the one which is most useful in that moment above the rest. 

So if a company has Our People First, Delight the Customer, Great Value Everyday and Ethical as their values you can see that on any given day you would be forced to decide whether, on this occasion, it is more important to be ethical or to provide a low price, to prioritise your own staff or let them suffer at the hands of rude customers because telling a customer what you think of them is likely not to "delight".

It is a constant trade off, when values are meant to provide staff with clarity about what matters so that they can make wise decisions without constant reference to their bosses.

Disney has got around this problem by prioritising their standards, meaning employees don't have to trade one value off against another in a random or convenient way. 

The four standards are:

Safety

Courtesy

The Show

Efficiency

Efficiency should never be prioritised over The Show (that sense that being at a Disney resort is magical). But The Show should never take priority over being polite. None of these matter more than Safety which is the number one standard. 

I wonder how many organisational values would stand up to this approach - whether they could be put in order. If not you run the risk of having values which don't help people make great decisions. And, I am left wondering, what is the point of them then?

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Cause and effect

An article by Guy Kawasaki in the latest issue of Wired magazine got me thinking about cause and effect. 

Kawasaki writes about Steve Jobs and advises wannabe super-entrepreneurs to interpret Jobs' success not try to impersonate it. 

So - Jobs wears jeans to work. But is that why he's successful? Will you be more successful if you wear jeans too? Probably not.

But will you give better presentations if, like Jobs, you use slides with pictures rather than slides packed with text? Probably yes. 

It can be a powerful exercise to observe people we admire and notice what the causes of their success might be. But we'll end up with the wrong answers if we simply reverse engineer and assume "These are all the qualities of a successful person, therefore, that's why they are successful".

Remember - successful people achieve success because of a number of qualities but also in spite of a number of qualities. Just make sure you don't confuse one with the other. 

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