As a leader one of your many responsibilities is to create and cultivate an environment where your people can perform well.
This means giving them training for their job, tools they need and the freedom to make decisions.
What I’ve found is that if you can do these three things, people will find a way to do their job better than you would know how, and better than you expect. If you train them, give them tools, and allow freedom to make decisions, they are going to become good at their job.
Why?
Because that’s their job. They are spending 40 + hours a week working in their specific area, and if there is one person who might know how to do it better, it will be that person.
Companies have proven time and time again that the best ideas bubble up from the bottom of the organization where people are in the trenches doing the day-to-day work.
In Kevin & Jackie Frebeirg’s book BOOM!, they tell the story about how pilots at Southwest Airlines realized they could save their company thousands of dollars in brake maintenance expenses simply by reverse thrusting their jet engines just before landing.
No offense to the CEO of Southwest (I highly admire Herb Kelleher) or any of it’s other great leaders, but that idea probably would have never have come out of an executive board meeting. It had to come from the people who were on the front lines of the work in the battle trenches day after day.
However, this presupposes that you have placed the people in your organization in their areas of strength. This means you took the time to get to know each of their individual strengths and talents, which requires more than a quick glance at a resume.
I honestly believe that a majority of American workers and volunteers all want to be good at their job, and even though they might not want to be at work, I know they want to do a good job while they are there.
People want to be good at their job, and it’s our job as leaders to create an environment where they are allowed to do that.
