When I had my vending business, one of the things we constantly told
employees was the following statement: “You are the expert at your job.”
It took several years for some of our people to actually believe it.
But
I’ve used this mantra in my business life ever since. The key is that,
when you make this change, you stop telling people what to do and you
start asking them their opinion about the best way to get something
done. This can produce all sorts of benefits — if the employees believe
your change in approach is sincere.
For that to be the case, you
really do need to stop telling people what to do and start asking
questions. Asking what was the best way to deal with an issue allowed me
to learn about a situation before expressing an opinion or issuing an
order. It’s amazing what you can find out when you ask questions instead
of making assumptions.
It helps if
you can learn to let employees make mistakes and learn from them. This
was tough for me. I spent my first seven or eight years in business
believing that mistakes were a bad thing. Eventually, I figured out that
as long as we learned from the mistakes we had the opportunity to make
our company better. Instead of thinking of mistakes as problems, we
started thinking of them as learning opportunities.
I see too many
companies where the owners assume their employees have little interest
in doing good work. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you can
almost always spot these companies when you encounter them. They are the
ones where you don’t feel valued as a customer.
On the other
hand, if you expect your employees to do a great job — and make that
expectation clear — I believe they generally will do just that. The
behavior of your employees comes from the expectations you set and the
way you communicate those expectations.
it is important to
encourage employees to take responsibility and not point fingers. This
was hard at our company. When mistakes were not allowed, blaming was one
of our favorite activities. It took years for the culture to change.
I
knew we had turned the corner when I was walking through our
food-production facility one day and noticed that the food being made
was below our standards. I asked the person who was making the food if
she would want to eat what she had made. Her answer was no. I then asked
her why she had made it that way.
Initially, her eyes were
focused on my shoes and her answer assigned responsibility to her
manager, her co-workers and ultimately me. After the fourth time I asked
her who was responsible, her body language changed dramatically. Her
head came up, she put her shoulders back, and she looked me in the eye
and said it was her responsibility.
This was a major moment for
her. She stopped being a victim and realized she could control what
happened in her workplace. She recognized that she was an expert at her
job, and she turned into a different person. Eventually, she became the
manager in our food production operation.
The reason it took us
years to make this change is that we had some people in management who
preferred to tell rather than ask. We had to break old habits. We had to
learn to trust our employees and to let them make mistakes. We would
take one step forward and two steps back. Then we would take three steps
forward and one step back. After several years we learned that we
really did trust our people to do the right thing. That was when
everything changed.
It takes time. But one day you walk into your
company, and you notice that things really are different. It happened
with us and it made us a much better company. One of the side benefits
was that we were able to reduce our training time for route drivers from
eight weeks to two weeks. We also increased the skill levels for new
drivers along with our driver-retention rates.
What happens when someone makes a mistake at your company?
Josh Patrick is a founder and principal at Stage 2 Planning Partners, where he works with private business owners on creating personal and business value.
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