How to Make Subordinates Colleagues
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You must give power in order to empower?
Empowerment is giving qualified people power and permission to act. Empowerment fails when leaders talk empowerment but hang on to permission or make it difficult to act.
Empowered people become colleagues not employees.
Transform your organization by making subordinates colleagues.
- Eliminate exclusive trappings of power. Reserve parking spaces based on achievement not position, for example.
- Destroy barriers by welcoming and respecting input from anyone. Never act dismissively.
- Mix with the “riff raff,” during meals and social activities. (Sarcasm intended)
- Honor people who actually do things rather than talk about doing things.
- Step back so others can step in.
Getting real:
In an “organization of colleagues” responsibility, accountability, and evaluation goes both ways.
The five suggestions I listed above are helpful but reflect safe top down structures. They aren’t enough. If you’re serious about empowering people, empower subordinates to give performance reviews to their bosses. If you are really serious, publish the results on your organizations intranet.
Colleagues hold each other responsible.
Resistance:
We can’t have subordinates evaluating bosses because:
- Subordinates aren’t qualified to give performance reviews. They don’t understand the Halo Effect, for example.
- Employees will use performance reviews to get back at superiors.
- Underlings won’t tell the truth, they’ll inflate reviews in order to appease bosses.
The reasons you resist bottom-up evaluations is your justification for hanging on to power and explains why people don’t feel empowered.
Good and bad news:
“Organizations of colleagues” are on the way in. Younger generations honor ideas from all quarters and disregard established structures. Thank the Internet and Social Media. Opportunities for empowered organizations are greater than ever.
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What attitudes and behaviors become important if subordinates give performance review to bosses?
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I work in an environment that strongly encourages the concept of colleagues.. Treating people in this manner does not diminish anyone’s power, quite the opposite. It allows our “subordinates” to think, contribute to the overall good of the organization, bring their “A” game every time. And all of this costs the organization nothing monetarily.
People must feel that they matter and are truly part of the organization and its processes. Obviously these people don’t have final say about things, but they have “buy-in”.
Martina
@martinamcgowan
Hi Martina,
Thanks for your comment. I think medicine, your field, is under loads of pressure both internally and externally. People like you give me hope.
I’ll push this conversation by saying final say is an interesting and challenging component of an organization of colleagues.
You have my best,
Dan
Dan, I agree, and not just because the hand-writing is on the wall that change is imminent. You remind me of what my Tac Officer always said about small unit tactics: “You gotta have the stuff. Whoever does, calls the play.” In a firefight, one of a dozen soldiers might have the right vantage to see the entire fight, and the right training/experience to know what tactics to use. You’d better listen to that person.
In my writing life I’d have said it was all about content: You can’t buy it, and you can’t make up for it with marketing.
Your post is all about respecting the fact that anyone on your team could be the one with the right stuff to move the team along at certain points in time. Creating structures that enable that and honor it are hard, but the culture really isn’t, because culture comes from your behavior as leader and the message you send.
Three simple things I’ve done for years: I always take the least desirable parking spot in the lot, I follow the same expense account rules (same daily food allowance, same hotel limitations, etc.) as the “lowest ranking” person working for me, and I drive a pool car instead of accepting a personal vehicle. That helps send the message that we’re all equal in position, with different roles to fill.
Once you get past the percieved differences in reward, your people are more likely to evaluate you fairly, to believe that you really do trust their judgment and value their initiative, etc.
Greg,
Your comment inspires me!
Best,
Dan
Greg –
These are some really powerful examples from different areas of your experience. I couldn’t agree more with you. Actions are everything when it comes to leading.
I also like your observation below, Dan, that we should have a bias toward action when developing people. Put people in the situations where they can have the experience they need. Run little experiments, notice what happens, and adjust accordingly.
The last thing I’ll add is that power is like information: each is useful only when shared.
Good to see you all here.
M
Oh, so much to say…
On the issue of treating subordinates like colleagues, I completely agree. Very often subordinates don’t know how decisions get made. Sometimes this is because leaders are hording power and sometimes they don’t realize they aren’t being transparent. This happened to me recently when we had a meeting with some new leaders in our company on process changes and they were stunned to find out the discussions in that meeting were all it took to make those changes. Letting employees peek behind the curtain to see how the leaders make the decision and give them input and sometimes even control over making those decisions will go a long way toward making them feel like valued and contributing members of the company.
As to upward performance reviews, I don’t think they work in most cases because downward performance reviews aren’t working. Do the evaluation criteria for employees apply to the CEO? Should the same criteria apply? Who gets to decide the CEO or the employees? If it is the employees and the CEO doesn’t agree then what happens when his actions don’t change as a result of the evaluations? The problem with upward reviews, is that they are probably not going to work unless you already have leaders that believe in respecting and empowering employees. Places that are respecting and empowering employees are the ones least likely to need the system.
I think that building an employee policy manual with a committee that includes people from every layer of the company, creating a recruiting plan using the ideas generate by those most recently hired, building a education and training programs around topic specifically requested by those being trained are better ways to bring employees meaningfully into the decision making progress. If you want to treat a subordinate as a colleague, the next time you present a product to a client take the team with you and make them part of the presentation. I believe that will make them fill more like colleagues than performance review system that doesn’t work.
I’m going to stop now before I really get worked up.
Hi Bonnie,
I’m not sure but I think you already got worked up. You covered an ocean of material in your comment.
What I hear from you is a move toward employee centric organizations. I think the answer to many of the important issues you raise is employees… especially the ones closest to the action.
Organizations don’t need to raise the curtain. They need to remove it. I acknowledge there are some cases where thats not possible but in many it is simply a decision by the people who put the curtain there in the first place.
Love your comment that performance reviews aren’t working. Agreed! I think most of your points are answered with “both.” Who decides CEO’s or Employees, both. Colleagues talk things over and come to agreements. Is that too much power for employees? Perhaps today it is but one day in the not too distant future, it will be standard operating procedure for organizations that attract and retain the best and the brightest. IMHO 🙂
Your experience and insights are valuable to me. Thank you for consistently sharing your thoughts and experience.
Best,
Dan
Hi Dan,
I love the opening line of this blog, “Empowerment is giving qualified people power and permission to act.” More of us need to learn how to “give” power instead of keeping it.
In addition, we also need to learn how to develop our subordinates into “qualified people”. If we learn how to recognize and develop the potential we see in our subordinates, there is no telling how far our organizations and businesses could grow.
Great stuff…Keep it coming!
Tim
Hi Tim,
Thanks for your comment and for pointing out the crucial term “qualified.”
I’ll add this on creating qualified people. Throw them in the fire and help them adapt as they go. In many cases trying to make people qualified before they do anything is futile. Of course a “throw them in” approach has many limitations… air plane pilots for example.
When we can’t throw them in we can adopt a “do with” approach. I’m advocating that we lean toward action when it comes to learning.
Thanks for sharing your insights and for your kind words, much appreciated.
Best,
Dan
The fastest route to qualification in many fields is failure. You learn more when things break than when they work. Take this as my vote against zero-defect policies and for tolerance for failure. If you’re serious about developing people you’ll see a lot of failure, so your process needs to anticipate it, allow it, mitigate it and grow through it. Fail forward!
Dear Dan,
I believe that fear is the most important factor, if subordinates give performance review to bosses. It can be effective in the organization where promotion is not based on superiors’ appraisal but actual achievement. Wherever superiors can affect and influences subordinate growth, bottom up performance review will be affected. It can be effective when mechanism does not reveal identity but focuses on actual facts with evidences. Alternatively, superiors’ performance review by subordinate could be based on intangible behaviors like, interactions, relationship, honors, respect, ego, connectivity, humility, integrity etc. I absolutely appreciate your point that leaders should honor people who actually do things rather than talk about doing things. Generally, fakers talk about the things and hang around bosses. The truth is that usually leaders like them. They block real talents and foster unethical practices. People, who do things, actually do not talk much about their achievement. So, leaders should know who achievers are and who fakers are.
To make subordinate colleagues, leaders should create a culture of respect, trust and humility. They should encourage transparency, honor efforts and take personal accountability in case of collective failure. Leaders should discourage blame game and yes man ship culture. If they are successful in creating such culture, I am sure subordinates will be their colleagues.
Dear Ajay,
I believe your analysis is correct. I’ll add that the fear employees feel is symptomatic of the problem… concentrated power.
Colleagues aren’t afraid to be honest with each other if they are on a level playing field.
Perhaps anonymity may be an acceptable way to initiate bottom up evaluations however, I suggest complete transparency about who performed the evaluation, who received the evaluation, and the content of the evaluation reflects a level playing field. IMHO
I always enjoy your insights. Thank you for affirming, suggesting, correcting, and adding to the conversation.
Best,
Dan
Social media knows no age limits…you only impose your own.
Is it a leadership obligation to transition subordinates to colleagues to become the next leader as an element of long term legacy? Maybe even plan for your role obsolescence—no easy task that.
If you do not empower and plan for transitions that do not occur and the company fails after you leave, while the failure may feed your ego, what you visioned, led and espoused died.
If you do not empower, you are not really a leader.
Doc,
Thank you for adding your insights.
You made me think about the ultimate test of leadership. What happens when you are gone?
Love your last sentence, powerful. I’ll add, if you aren’t empowering others you may have a position but you’re losing power in a changing world.
I’m thankful for you,
Dan
My boss says the real job of a leader is to work him/herself out of a job. Leading implies going somewhere; once you get there, the leader’s job is finished. A team that has arrived no longer needs you.
Wow. I think this is EXACTLY why I don’t enjoy my current job as much as I enjoyed my previous job. My former “boss” never introduced me as someone who worked for him–but someone who worked WITH him on the festival. Now, my job is very structured around senior staff vs. everyone else.
Do you think the size of an organization might make this collegial relationship easier (fewer people vs. more people)?
You raise a good question Ali, however, even in large organizations, the tone set by the leader can create healthy pockets of empowerment.