Lots of organisations have sign in Boards which help us know whether people are in or out.
If you spend a lot of time out of the office or you want to go on holiday, how do you make sure that decision making doesn’t just grind to a halt?
Well, one of the lightbulb moments for me on the What Is Leadership video (which you can view on David Marquet’s YouTube channel) was the moment in which the officer said, “Captain, I intend to submerge the ship” to which Captain Marquet responded with two questions:
Firstly, “is it safe?” representing the technical competence and secondly, “is it right?” representing the clarity, the overall purpose.
So, here’s something to try:
Think about a recent decision which you have made and you’ve communicated to the team but maybe they don’t understand the rationale behind the decision. Ask them to guess what you were thinking when you made that decision. This is called making the invisible, visible.
Share your thinking and put the two together – your thinking and their thinking – to see whether you could improve the decision making criteria.
Because giving up control isn’t just about allowing people to go off and do whatever they want, it’s about ensuring that people understand: is it safe and is it the right thing to do?
I’m Peter Russian of Remarkable, the UK and Ireland partner for Intent-Based Leadership®. Let us know how you get on?
