Build Accountable Freedom

Create permission for your people

Right now, frontline teams will be dealing with customers who are experiencing high anxiety and ambiguity caused by Covid-19. Not all of these customer issues are going to fit neatly into the current company rule book. There is going to be plenty of grey areas and opportunity for companies to respond to customers in a human and empathetic way. Shackling your people to a set if rigid processes and procedures is not going to make the customers experience feel great.

Think about it, have you ever called a company and been met with “Sorry, I am not allowed to do that”, “Our process does not allow that…..that’s just the policy, there is nothing I can do” or “You have to speak to my manager I am not able to authorise that”.

I know I have!

How often as a customer do you experience service where people don’t have the autonomy to make decisions, they come across as unaccountable, they don’t have the “permission” and where front line service people want to do the right thing for you as a customer, but can’t because they are handcuffed by the process or chose to hide behind it! 

So, what do we mean by permission? A permission culture is where employees have the ‘permission’ to make decisions that are in the best interest of the customer. People feel safe to step outside of the process (within reason) to act on the customers behalf. Continuous improvement is at the forefront of people’s minds, processes are questioned, the status quo is challenged and ideas are generated to improve the customer experience. Leaders create a team climate where people are coached and supported to make good decisions. Rather than micromanaging, they help they teams grow and learn.

At this moment in time, teams have switched largely to working from home, and there is a temptation for leaders and managers to start to micromanage. ‘If I don’t have 3 check in calls a day and demand the camera on in all meetings…John will be sitting in his jogging bottoms watching Netflix’' kind of mentality starts to surface.

The surprising thing is though when you extend trust to people and say ‘I trust you’ to do the right thing; people will amaze you and do extraordinary things. The flip side is, there is nothing more demotivating than a manager that suffocates and drains your spirit through micromanagement.

Give people permission to do the right thing, and they will reward you in buckets.

Why do we need to give people permission?

Dan Pink in his book ‘Drive – The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us’ suggests autonomy, is one of the three core elements of motivations identified after four decades of scientific research on human motivation. Autonomy is the desire we all have to direct our own lives and to have a sense of choice. People want to feel a level of trust, being trusted in how to accomplish their work; trusted to use some level of judgement. When people experience autonomy at work, they take more ownership, they feel empowered. Even in roles that traditionally have lacked any levels of autonomy, the best leaders’ and managers are finding ways round this, finding ways to create some permission and reaping the rewards of more engaged employees.

Empowering employees improves performance by 11% (Harvard)

So, what is getting in the way?

If we know empowerment impacts employee engagement and employee engagement directly impacts the service we provide and our bottom line. If we know are employees are asking for more empowerment. If we know our customers are feeding back, they want more empowered front-line people. What stops us, as leaders, giving more empowerment to our people? Here are a few possible reasons:

• We don’t give permission
• Permission is there – but people don’t know they have it
• Risk and exposure – mistakes that could lead to financial loss
• Fear of letting go
• Sometimes it easier to be command and control
• Comfort with the process, sometimes it is easier to hide behind the process
• Managers pay lip service to empowerment, but do not really believe
• Managers do not really know what empowerment means
• Managers fail to establish boundaries around employee empowerment 
• Managers have defined the decision-making authority and boundaries with staff, but then micromanage the work
• Failure to provide a strategic permission framework, in which decisions have a compass and success measurements
• Managers fail to provide the information and access to information, training, and learning opportunities needed for people to make good decisions

Re-read the list, how many of these are in our control? How many of these can leaders influence and resolve? I would suggest quite a few of them.

Imagine an expert: a well-intentioned expert.

They want to help all employees rise above their imperfections. They look at all the fumbling inefficiency around them, and they know that, if only people would learn some simple steps, the world would be a better place, and everyone would thank them. Do you recognise this person sometimes?

When someone has decided on their own course of action or best way to proceed on a task or project, they are much more committed to its success. They are motivated and keen to make it work. If it is your idea that they don’t agree with or believe in, they are less motivated and committed.

As leaders and managers, we are often compulsive helpers: we love to help people. Sometimes in our desire to help people, we can over-help them by giving them all our ideas thereby not helping them. We constrict them, sap the life from them and shrivel their spirit and value.

Command and control is so 19th century

When Frederick Winslow Taylor arrived at Bethlehem Iron in 1898 he brought a new set of tools to maximize the efficiency of the steelworks. At that point, along with everything else to do with business, management became more systematic, far more about command and control and less about inspiration and empowerment.

The people you had working for you were replaceable and interchangeable. They were like the cogs in the machine; they were trained to do the same thing with complete consistency. Taylor viewed the role of management as that of enforcer, enforcing the adoption of standards and the enforcement of co-operation. Business historically, and still very much today, often seeks stability and control: the bigger the corporate beast, the larger the resource base and the geographic spread from the centre. There are often more imposed controls in place, in the attempt to mitigate risks, increase certainty and stop people stealing paper clips.

Businesses that created an empowered culture grew 4x more quickly (Cornell University)

Businesses still cling to a 20th century and ‘tailorist’ view of the world, where there is a fixation on numbers and productivity. This results in a command and control style of leadership and management. However, with an increased expectation from employees to have more autonomy (especially millennials who make up much of the frontline. By 2020, millennials will form 50% of the global workforce. By 2030, millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce) this old stage leadership and management approach does not cut it and is damaging workplace cultures, customer experience and profit.

Creating Accountable Freedom

‘Our society is funded on freedom and capitalism, but ironically, the institution in which we see the least amount of freedom is business. Some might say that businesses are the last bastions of command and control dictatorships, where ideas are quashed and where permission is an occasional pastime’ (Bob Chapman)

Let’s be real here, this isn’t an easy journey for companies and teams to undertake, it requires a shift in the day to day ways of working for many teams and it won’t be smooth. There are going to always be rules in which we will need to abide. That’s life.

You have to be brave. The minute you go out there and say we are increasing permission and empowerment, and then follow up the next day with what colleagues perceive is a silly rule, you lose people. They will not believe. So, the role of the leader and manager is to make sense of those rules that are in place to help and clear the path.

Increasing empowerment and permission is not about decreasing accountability, it is the opposite of this. Empowerment is about giving colleagues Accountable Freedom. 

‘Accountable freedom encapsulates two ideas: freedom, the opportunity to exercise personal choice and judgement, to have ownership of the work that you do and the decisions you make; and responsibility, ensuring that personal choice is exercised with care and concern for people and the requirements of the organisation’ (Bob Chapman)

And this does not just work in a customer experience setting....

Netflix’s 126-slide culture manifesto on SlideShare, titled ‘Freedom & Responsibility’. This deck has become famous as an example of ‘hands-off management’, but if you read it carefully, you’ll see that the responsibility part is as important as the freedom. The holiday policy may say that Netflix’s employees can take a break whenever they need to, but the implication is that they also work whenever they need to, even if that means before nine or beyond five. Similarly, the open expense policy includes an expectation that employees will “act in Netflix’s best interest”... and I can guarantee they wouldn’t be hands-off if someone suddenly filed a receipt for a few hundred quid at the races!

In a lecture for the RSA , Dan Pink tells a story of an Australian software company called Atlassian, whose leadership team give their developers permission, once a quarter on a Thursday afternoon, to work on anything they want, however they want, with whoever they want, for twenty-four hours. The only rule (and here comes the accountable bit) is that everyone must show their results to the company at the end of the twenty-four hours.

“It turns out that that one day of pure undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software, a whole array of ideas for new products that otherwise had never emerged,” Pink says. “Now this is not an incentive, this is not the sort of thing that I would have done three years ago before I knew this research. I would have said ‘You want people to be creative and innovative, give them a fricken innovation bonus! If you do something cool I'll give you twenty five hundred dollars!’ They're not doing this at all. They're essentially saying, ‘You probably want to do something interesting, let me just get out of your way’. One day of autonomy produces things that had never emerged.”

Without adequate freedom, empowerment, people cannot contribute in the way they are capable of, nor can they lead meaningful and fulfilling lives. We need to free people from excessive hierarchy, silly rules etc. and whilst protecting the business. 

Unshackle the chains.

Giving permission is scary, but it really is one of those things that separates average customer experience from the amazing kind. That’s because process only accounts for 80 to 90 percent of what’s required in a sales and service job. It’s the 10 to 20 percent of grey, the space for something personal and flexible, that allows your front-line staff to truly put your customers’ needs first. But they need your permission if they’re going to make it work.

One Telco we know, pioneered and approach called ‘Kill a silly rule’, where employees are rewarded for pointing out silly rules that negatively impacts the customer or their employees. This is down in an adult way, as they were always be rules. They encourage a freedom innovate, challenge and exercise personal judgement.

‘A handful of shared values are worth more than 1000 rules, something to think about’ (Bob Chapman)

Things you can do right now

Start consciously by publicly rewarding and recognising when people do the right thing, even (especially) when outside of process. Make sure you do this at least once a day. It may be hard at first, and you may have to single out very small and specific things (such as an unexpected comment you heard a front line person make), but once you get into the habit of noticing these things, you’ll spot many more - and many more will start to crop up.

Resistance is inevitable. People at your organisation may well have gone through years of trying to do things differently, and been repeatedly smacked back down, or worse, are fearful of the consequences. Permission does not thrive in a climate of fear and where there is an absence of trust. 

Again, reiterate to managers and leaders that permission doesn’t have to mean anarchy. Process is great. The art lies in combining it with the freedom to be human when process doesn’t fit.

Here are five things you can do right now to start to create accountable freedom and permission in your organisation;

Build trust and psychological safety. Trust and safety are the glue that holds all relationships together. Great leaders and managers know that trust is hard won and easily lost. They focus on creating psychological safety and know that, if this is missing, ‘fear’ creeps in and drowns the creative spirit of individuals and the collective. In the absence of fear, people can make the right decisions for your customers.

Create a permission framework. Having a permission framework is the bookends or the lines on the football pitch; players have the freedom to express themselves on the pitch, but within certain boundaries. In hierarchal cultures boundaries are like barbed wire fences, in empowered cultures they are more like a rubber band; over time they stretch the rubber band to give even more freedom to people to make the right decisions. 

Talk to the people closest to the customer experience because they are the people who know what the customer really needs and together as a team you can share experiences and examples to build confidence and a sense of empowerment. 

Let go. Give people the space to be the best they can be, providing them some freedom to make decisions, encourage autonomy and foster a learning environment, where it is SAFE to make decisions and mistakes!  

Coach judgement. You can keep the permission culture alive through more focused conversations around judgement. One of the challenges that arises is leaders and managers who get too hung up on outcomes and whether the outcome was ‘right’. That’s not going to help. The minute you coach anybody on whether what they did was right or wrong they’ll never step outside of process ever again.

The key is to move back up the thinking chain have the conversation about the thought processes that got them to that decision, because that helps you to understand how they got to their judgement. That’s where the conversation should be had. We call it coaching judgement, and here’s how you do it.

• Tomorrow identify an action where someone in your team stepped outside process or could have stepped outside the process.
• Set the context that you are wanting to explore their thought process to help them for future situations. 
• Explain that it is a random example and its correctness is irrelevant to the coaching session. It is the approach that you want to explore with them.
• Begin with an inform, e.g. “I notice that you discussed xx”
• Follow this with a question about their thought process, e.g.
•  “What were you thinking at that point?”
•  “What were you aiming to get to?”    
• Then a question around outcome, e.g.: 
•  How appropriate was the outcome you achieved?     
•  Then a question about decision, e.g.: 
•  “What stopped you from doing x?”
•  “What gave you the confidence to do x?”    
• Finally, a question about next time, e.g.: 
• If anything, what would you do differently next time?

Letting the lunatics run the asylum?

Creating a permission culture, at Best Buy, has resulted in a 35% increase in productivity and 320% decrease in staff turnover (HBR)

It might be frightening, but as leaders we need to learn to let go. Giving permission might not be as bad as you think. It won’t be like letting the lunatics run the asylum! We need to trust people to do the right thing, but this is a smart, not an indiscriminate, trust.

The leader and managers role are to support people to make the right choices, not control those choices all the time. It is a about allowing people to make mistakes, and learn from them, rather than chastise them. If you want employees to feel empowered to assist customers in creative ways, the moment you reprimand a single employee for “doing something wrong” every other employee will then revert to their previous, timid ways, and never go out of their way for a customer again. But it is also about holding people to account for outcomes and the decisions they make. It is accountable freedom…

‘We are all accountable to each other. We have a shared responsibility’.

That’s the spirit you’re looking for, and it thrives in the space between total freedom and overbearing control. Adopt the right mindsets, skills and approaches and ‘permission’ can quickly take hold and transform the levels of empowerment, accountable freedom and engagement in your teams.

 #leadership #empowerment #management