The more employees at all levels understand the strategy, financial situation, and the day-to-day context of whatâs going on, the better they become at making educated decisions without involving those above them in the hierarchy.
Related Quotes
When giving and receiving feedback is common, people learn faster and are more effective at work.
When those lean teams are exclusively made up of exceptional-performing employees, the managers do better, the employees do better, and the entire team works betterâand faster.
My goal was to make employees feel like owners and, in turn, to increase the amount of responsibility they took for the companyâs success. However, opening company secrets to employees had another outcome: it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.
In most businesses, without even realizing it, senior managers stunt the abilities and intelligence of their own workforce by keeping financial and strategic information hidden. Although just about all companies talk about empowering staff, in the vast majority of organizations, real empowerment is a pipe dream because employees arenât given enough information to take ownership of anything.
If you have high talent density and organizational transparency firmly in place, a faster, more innovative decision-making process is possible. Your employees can dream big, test their ideas, and implement bets they believe in, even when in opposition to those hierarchically above them.
You know youâre successfully leading with context when your people are moving the team in the desired direction by using the information theyâve received from you and those around you to make great decisions themselves.