Tuesday, July 25, 2017

The Missing How


The theory is that a supervisor should simply tell team members what he or she wants done and then back off and let them work out how it will be done. The result of this magical practice is that the employees will naturally come up with a great way of achieving the mission.

Or they won't.

It all depends, of course, on the ability of the employees and the nature of the mission. The reason why I am skeptical of that clever avoidance of the "how" is that if the employees are not prepared to handle it, the only creativity you'll see is in the caliber of their excuses as to why it was not done.

A quick example: the leadership for a nonprofit organization tells a group of employees that knows next to nothing about fund-raising to raise funds. They receive no training on how to do so but are given extensive briefings on why it is desirable; a bit of information they already knew.

The result? The fund-raising project fails and the following month another briefing on the necessity of fund-raising is given.

The cycle continues.

The Why is where thought dwells. The How is where action will, or will not, appear. 

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