Norm, thank you for your review of Gino and Staats article, Developing Employees Who Think for Themselves (2015). It was an interesting perspective on employee productivity, creativity and independence.
Regarding the shift in process, their article encourages employers to shift away from the manager being in control, rather to the employee being responsible for the process by which to achieve the outcome. This gives employees a sense of ownership of the process and autonomy in making decisions. I like that it also enables them to fix something if it goes wrong, thus holding them accountable (Gino & Staats, 2015).
I am curious about this. If the manager becomes only focused on the outcome, and shifts away from process, encouraging employees to think for themselves, what does that look like for consistency throughout the organization? The article states that broad processes could still be required but still provide for employee decisions (Gino & Staats, 2015). Also, that there are some organizations training their employees in critical thinking and process improvement skills (Gino & Staats, 2015). I would be interested to know about what mechanism the employer would use to teach and mentor employees to think for themselves while also upholding business standards? My concern would be that if not implemented carefully, productivity would lag and quality would be inconsistent. What would be your views on this, as a business leader? Have you ever seen this in practice? My feeling is that over all, shifting the process to the employee would empower them, but there would need to be some scaffolding along the way to ensure all business policies and requirements would be met.
Allowing employees to develop their identity at work is important. By having a sense of who they are and the worth of their contributions, I believe that their commitment level to their job would increase, and they would be proud of their accomplishments. This is certainly an aspect of professionalism. Professionals are trained to do their jobs well, however, they are able to use their professional judgement and bring their own perspectives and approaches to their work. In my work in schools, I see this often in classrooms. Every teacher is different and though they implement the same curriculum, they have the freedom to express their individuality in terms of how they run their classrooms and work with kids. The more they have the opportunities to try new things their own way, or follow their passions, the more ownership they have and the more they contribute to the school as a whole.
Finally, giving employees the aspect of time is important. I certainly see the trend with millenials wanting to have control over their time, when and how they work. There is certainly a shift to people wanting to maintain a quality of lifestyle, while still being productive at work. Also, if one is going to transfer the responsibilities of process to the employee, they need time to consider and plan how they are going to do it within working hours.
In my context of education, as administrators, we implement this strategy by carving out time for our teachers to engage in critical thinking and creative planning. We schedule time once per week when the teacher’s are released from their classrooms to meet together to collaborate. During this time, they collaborate on unit planning, school initiatives, and curriculum implementation. They generate ideas and initiate a plan to complete them. Through this process, they achieve their overall goals.
However, to come back to my comment earlier about shifting to giving over control of the process, sometimes this can be stalled as they struggle with determining a plan for a process to get things done. Even when given broad process instructions, it takes some time for them to work it out and fully understand their goal and settle on a process for completion. Yet, when successful, by using the strategies that Gina and Staats (2015) suggest, it is evident that by passing the process over to them, allowing for independence to reflect their individuality in their work, and time to engage in a planning process they become better teachers and a stronger team.
Gino, F. & Staats, B. (2015, June). Developing Employees Who Think for Themselves. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/06/developing-employees-who-think-for-themselves
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