Trust or control?

Imagine a scenario where your employees keep on changing things. All in the name of improvement and innovation. Everybody is spending time making your organisation run that little bit better. It sounds great, a management nirvana, until you realise that they are tinkering with processes, messing with procedures and running roughshod over policies.

It would be a governance nightmare.

How would you go about controlling it?

Blind trust is a risky strategy. Instead you could:

Develop a set of change management procedures

Implement a project prioritisation scorecard

Enforce the use of a plan on a page, one page summaries, success criteria assessments and cost benefit analyses

Employ a change manager

Ensure that all decision approvals had to go through 3 organisational layers, a proposer, an approver and an authoriser

Commission a Change Steering Committee (a.k.a. SteerCo for the terminally with it)

If you want to stifle innovation and suppress change in your organisation their a plenty of tried and tested ways of going about it.

An alternative

Set some guide rails.

First define the what. Be explicit about your purpose and where you want to go. What would good look like?

Then work through the how. What are the values you want your organisation to espouse? How do you want your employees to behave?

When you are clear about the what and the how let your employees get on with it. If they are going in the right direction and behaving the right way then they can’t get too much wrong.

Unfortunately all of that would require not a little trust on your part

Trust or control?

Micromanagement is hard work but it might stop you looking bad.

Creating an environment where people can be trusted might even be harder, but could make you look really good

Unfortunately you can’t have both.

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work. Peter Drucker

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Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash