We want our people to take initiative. When they see opportunities to drive greater success, we want them to seize those opportunities. When they encounter a difficult customer situation, we want them to figure it out and resolve it.
While we develop playbooks, processes, and methodologies to help our people perform and succeed, these can never anticipate everything that will arise. We want to encourage our people to figure things out, to be agile and adapt.
Of course, it’s important to provide some boundaries. We can’t have them do things that are unethical. We may provide constraints to their creativity in structuring and pricing deals. We may restrict them from pursuing opportunities outside our ICP. But within those very loose boundaries, we want to motivate them to take initiative, to figure things out, to succeed.
But in doing this, while we hope there will be positive outcomes, they will sometimes fail. What they hoped would work, that would create a tipping point to succeeding, actually failed.
Too often, rather than recognizing that periodic failures accompany taking initiative, we punish that failure. Rather than learning from it, growing, and encouraging our people to continue to take initiative, we punish them. It may be as extreme as firing them, more likely it is criticism and redirection: “You aren’t following our playbook, you aren’t doing your job the way we want you to do it….”
As a result of this, rather than continuing to take initiative, we train our people to play it safe. Where they might see an opportunity to do something different, they don’t act on it because of what might happen if they fail.
When our people focus on playing it safe, we and they lose. We miss huge growth opportunities. We miss huge learning opportunities. We underperform our potential.
To encourage people to take the initiative:
- Demonstrate that in the personal example you set within the organization.
- Give them “permission” to take initiative.
- Define the boundaries, but don’t limit their abilities to take initiative within those boundaries.
- Recognize there may be times when they have to cross the boundaries, review these situations, figure out whether it might make sense to do so. If you choose not to, make sure your people are part of that decision, look at alternative things they might try, help them understand if you decide, “not this time.”
- Recognize people who are taking the initiative, who are defining new things, new ways to achieve our goals. Encourage others to do the same.
- Look at what these people are doing. Should we include those as part of our standard playbooks. Are they doing things that help us grow and innovate.
- Learn from their failures. Talk about what happened, think about what might have been done differently. Encourage them to keep trying.
We don’t maximize our ability to learn and grow by playing it safe. We must take initiative.
Leave a Reply