While Toyota was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You donât have to ask permission to take responsibility.
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2.2. Data Versus Opinion
âNot everyone on the team agreed with me. Thatâll happen sometimes when one person has to make the final call. In those moments itâs your responsibility as a manager or a leader to explain that this isnât a democracy, that this is an opinion-driven decision and youâre not going to reach the right choice by consensus. But this also isnât a dictatorship. You canât give orders without explaining yourself.
If you build an organization made up of high performers, you can eliminate most controls. The denser the talent, the greater the freedom you can offer.
People desire and thrive on jobs that give them control over their own decisions. Since the 1980s, management literature has been filled with instructions for how to delegate more and âempower employees to empower themselves.â The thinking is exactly what weâve heard from Paolo. The more people are given control over their own projects, the more ownership they feel, and the more motivated they are to do their best work. Telling employees what to do is so old-fashioned, it leads to screams of âmicromanager!â âdictator!â and âautocrat!
If your goal is to build a more inventive, fast, and flexible organization, develop a culture of freedom and responsibility by establishing the necessary conditions so you can remove these rules and processes too.
In a complex situation, when you want to empower the entire organization to be able to act without direction from the top, having a shared view of what the purpose is and how each participant fits into it is absolutely critical. It is only with a basis of a shared understanding of what weâre all trying to achieve here that distributed action is possible.