Cultivate Employee Judgment

Responsive, Effective Organizations emerge when Teams, and individuals are able to apply appropriate judgment to situations in their zone of knowledge, and influence. However, employees exercising their own judgment can be risky, both to the individual and the company. The obvious choice would be better training… Yet, One cannot truly instruct another into ‘good judgment’. Instruction only imparts knowledge of previous exercises of good judgment. In the moment where judgment is called for, what is needed is wisdom. And wisdom is built through knowledge, and practice.

The challenge then is how to create the real opportunity for employees to practice judgment, so they might develop wisdom. And to do all that, while minimizing the risk to the business. Real Opportunities means real risks. Otherwise it’s still a classroom setting. So how can leaders create small spaces for testing judgment, with real cost, but not too much?

While that is a frightful prospect, beware the seemingly ‘safer’ route, that is ‘creating exhaustive rules’, or prescribing ‘just this’ behavior. Down that path lies ‘Obedient Sabotage’. When employees are reprimanded for exercising appropriate judgment, instead of mentored, you create ‘Obedient Saboteurs’. These Saboteurs are not malicious, they just don’t want to get in trouble again. And you can count on them to follow the rules, even to the detriment of the company goals because they don’t want to get in trouble again. The book Simple Sabotage has more to say on the topic, and more effectively than I can here.

The choice trends either to building up your team’s effective judgment and thus gain effectiveness as a company, or to begin bogging down your organization with very obedient, perhaps too obedient, rule-followers who may compromise your goal in their pursuit of the rules. An organization is only as effective as her people. Creating small moments for exercising judgment will cost money. It’s not as clean and distinct as the ‘training budget’, but allowing a few hours setback on a work item to build the judgment of a junior engineer pays off in the Long-Term.

It may not pay off in the next year. It may not even pay off when they’re a mid-level engineer. But when they are a principal engineer running some big project, where their decisions can cost the company millions, you’ll be grateful they learned how to avoid critical mistakes when it only cost you a few hundred.