Following up from my previous post, let’s reflect on how you can, as a manager or thought leader, help the people working with you become realistic risk takers, independently from the company culture that is surrounding you, and to which you are bound.
Before giving my thoughts on the topic, let’s dive into your own environment and spend a bit of self-reflective time. Imagine you are hearing the pounding alarm of a fire drill exercise that comes at the worst time ever. Your job does not require you to be exempted but it just happens that you have to finish a very important presentation to be given to your management in the next hour. You know that if you participate to the fire drill exercise – which is your corporate duty – you are not going to be ready as you could for that meeting. But at the same time, you know that you have to be a good corporate citizen and follow your colleagues downstairs, as much as you expect your team members to participate as they should. What do you decide to do? Opt out and continue your work – knowing that not only your manager is going to rightfully blame you for the miss, but also that you are going to give a bad example to your team members? Or get out of the building – knowing that you are going to personally fail in the management meeting, a lot more important to your day-to-day job and to the appreciation of your management than a fire drill?
Answering this question is probably going to give you an idea of your personal risk taking style: if you stay to work on what is important for you, you are probably someone who is ready to receive a personal blame, and prefer doing what you consider right for the job. You will accept the consequences, as you hope your manager will understand. Reality of the work is more important to you than the perception of others on how you act. On the contrary, if you go down, you are rather someone who puts the corporate rules first, who prefers the safety of the rules, even if the rules sometimes alter the outcome of your work. After all, everybody is in the same boat and you cannot bear the consequences, nor be expected to do the impossible, when the environment imposes that kind of constraint on you such as a fire drill. You want to be perceived as a good employee above all, complying to the rules, before confronting the reality of your job.
Now, imagine you are the manager who expects someone working for you to go down at the fire drill exercise. What would you expect from your employee? And how would you react if the employee is choosing a different option than the one you would have opted for?
What I am trying to let you experience via this imaginary self-reflective situation is the fact that we all have, as individuals, different risk appetites. And that’s fine. We are all individuals, with different ways of approaching given situations. And that diversity is a good thing. But I believe that a manager has the duty to somewhat encourage a bit of risk taking, within the boundaries of what the job allows, if he or she expects to get a minimum of innovation and creativity that will allow a company to stay afloat in an ever changing and fast paced environment. But how? How can you, as a manager, encourage your employees to dare being creative, while keeping them within the boundaries of compliance and discipline? How can you, as a manager, encourage structured free innovation, while ensuring that the job gets done, in control?
Here are five tips, which, in my opinion, apply whatever your risk appetite and whatever your company policy and duties.
1.Accept failures
My first recommendation is to accept that people sometimes fail. Failure is part of a successful journey. Failure is the best way of learning. Failure is the most effective way to avoid a similar or bigger trap in the next portion of the journey. I am not suggesting to force your people to fail, nor to encourage them to fail. Failure should not be ignored either – in the contrary, failure must be used in a non-dramatic way, to help growing your team. Not only to help the employees grow through their own self-learning experience; but also for a manager to better anticipate and analyse upcoming situations, and better manage the next similar event to turn it into a success.
Risk aversion comes from the dramatization and stigmatization. Once, as a manager, you accept the fact that people will sometimes fail – you as much as your employees – failure is not a big deal anymore, and risk aversion erases. Failure becomes part of the learning curve.
I am not suggesting either to fall into the other extreme – meaning to make failures part of your business as usual. Lessons must be learnt, and behavior must change afterwards. But the consequences of a failure must be smaller than the size of a success. And I would even suggest: find what was still slightly successful in spite of the ultimate objective not being achieved. That will keep your people optimistic and enthusiastic in spite of having taken a hit.
2.Take accountability for the failures, but grant successes away
The next thing that a manager should do to encourage his or her team members to dare taking enough risk to encourage innovation is to be the one accountable for failures, while the team members are the ones accountable for successes. As a manager, be the one who fails, but let your people succeed.
Be the one who fails – when an objective is not met, communicate the failure in a realistic way, presenting it as a management issue. Present the situation in a way that shows that the employee could not have succeeded in this situation, so it is not his or her personal fault. Instead, analyse the causes for the failure, and find a way to relate these causes to you, as the manager. The only caveat I would give, is the situation when the employee had a non-constructive attitude when doing the work. In that case, still be the one who failed in the eyes of your management and peers, but have a serious debrief session with the employee, and be clear that it cannot happen again.
Let your people succeed – when your team delivers a good success story, praise them accordingly. Communicate the success as the one of the employee, but never yours. Make them visible for the work they have done, even if you sometimes had to step in to help them.
3.Help and support throughout failures
When a project is unsuccessful, it is seldom a black or white story. Some good things have probably been done along the way. Recognize these small good things, even if they did not lead to a successful outcome. Clearly identify what lead to fail, as opposed to what was done well, even if the good things were not good enough to turn around the project.
As much as being realistic on the good things, also recognize that the project was a real challenge. The intention is always to ensure that the employee does not see the result as his or her personal failure. It is the failure of a team, including whoever has been involved in it.
4.Adapt recognition and rewards to the size of the success
Another important management component to make your team willing to take a minimum amount of risk is to adapt the recognition to the size of the success. A small “Thank You” note is good, but it is not adapted to the recognition deserved for bringing a hard project to delivery. Find a way to really recognize your employees: promotions (even if the employee has been less than 3 years in the job, or whatever rule HR is imposing), small gifts, the opportunity to communicate the success beyond just you… anything that clearly help the employee to be fully recognize for the efforts.
Most of the time, failing has really hard consequences, while succeeding is somewhat just “normal +”. In that context, the impression given to the employees is that they can only lose… in that context, how would you expect your people to be willing to run an extra mile? Why trying if you can only fail?
5.Manage by outcomes not by tasks
My last tip regarding preventing risk aversion is a management concept that goes far beyond encouraging or discouraging risk taking: manage your people by asking them to achieve a goal, rather than by giving them a list of tasks to do.
By giving a goal, you make your people accountable for what they do. As such, they are going to be naturally assessing the level of risks they are themselves comfortable with. Their level does not have to be yours – if you want to impose your risk style, do the job yourself! If you want people to succeed, they have to be comfortable with what they are committing for, and most importantly, they have to be comfortable with the way they are going to achieve the job. If you micro-manage, if you tell your people to do a series of tasks, they are certainly going to do it, but they are going to feel awkward and uncomfortable all along the way, and they are going to lean on you to bear the consequences. In other words, they lose accountability. In that context, they will never ever take a bit of risk to excel in what you are asking them.
On the contrary, if you make them accountable by letting them swim in the level of water they need – not too deep, not too shallow – they are going to surprise you. They are going to take some risk, sometimes, when they feel confident they can over-achieve. But they are going to stay quiet when they feel the risk is not worth it.
To conclude, I started with letting you assess on your own your risk style: conservative or daring. It is your own personal style, independently from your management, your employees, and your corporate culture. If you are part of the conservative group, you will probably find it extremely hard to apply these five tips. They probably give you the feeling to get out of control of what your employees do; they probably remind you of a situation when you attempted to let people try their own way, but you, yourself, paid the price of their failure too heavily. They are probably too far from your control zone. And so be it. As a manager, I believe you have the duty to try. If you are part of the daring group, you probably find that these tips are not enough to create a bit of risk appetite in your more conservative employees. But at the same time, these employees might sometimes have helped you to adopt a safer route. Anyhow, being a manager is also about accepting diversity and adapting to it, isn’t it?
The Process Excellence String of Ariadne 