As a company grows and hires more people, the variation in how people do their work can start to create inefficiencies and increase the likelihood of errors. If you’ve moved into management as part of that kind of growth, you may find value in creating standards to rein in the variation your team has to deal with.
And if you earned your management role in part because of your technical expertise, it can be tempting to see how efficient it would be for you to set those standards based on your own expertise.
But efficiency doesn’t always lead to effectiveness.
It’s possible that you really do know the single best way to get the work done. Hypothetically, you just might be able to create the perfect set of standards to produce the optimal balance between predictability and flexibility. It’s unlikely, but for the sake of argument, let’s suppose you can do it.
Even if the standards you create in isolation were the best possible guidelines to direct your team’s work, there’s still a problem with creating those standards by yourself.
Documented standards are fairly useless unless people a) remember them, and b) conform to them. Your team members will remember your standards much better when they participate in the discussion and debate that created them. And that participation will also help them feel like the resulting rules are their own. That psychological ownership will make them more likely to conform to the standards they helped create.
Even if your team lands somewhere different from the details you would have documented, you’re likely to get much greater value in a set of standards that they create for themselves with your guidance.
If you’d like a thinking partner to help you with your own team, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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