Leadership Nudge™ – Increase the Blue Work
In Leadership Nudge 127 we introduced the concept of red work and blue work. Blue work is decision work. It is cognitive work. It’s leadership work. Red work is execution. It’s the doing. It’s physical. It’s process. It’s compliant work.
One way to view your organization is to look at who is doing red work and who is doing blue work. In the very traditional industrial age organizational design you didn’t need a lot of people doing blue work. Most organizations had just one person at the top doing the blue work. They are deciding what we are going to make and how we are going to make it. Everyone else is doing what they are told.
One of the ideas behind red work and blue work is to increase the number of people doing blue work. Push blue work further down the organization. We build more leaders as we get more people thinking and more people involved in making decisions. We change our hierarchy from a little blue and a lot of to red to mostly blue!
Our Leadership Nudge to you this week is this:
Look at your organization to see who is doing red work, and who is doing the blue work. See if you can increase the amount of blue work that people are doing lower in the hierarchy.
Let us know what how it goes!
Enroll for the Leadership Nudge™ – www.davidmarquet.com
Click here to read my Forbes article on mentoring programs and why you don’t want to have one.
