Generally speaking, there two big ways to get your team to do what needs to be done.
Obedience: You can require obedience, with a very detailed list of what needs to be done, and expect them to follow it to the letter. If you’re flipping burgers at McDonald’s, this is how it needs to be.
Standards: Alternatively, you can set standards to be met and trust that your team will find the best ways to meet them.
There’s a third option of doing neither, but that’s likely to be met with frustration and failure.
In his new book “The Song of Significance“, Seth Godin pushes the idea of standards:
“It’s unlikely that we can consistently create significant work without standards. We need consistent, measurable, external benchmarks of quality. We can establish expectations for our work and meet them.”
Standards can help with obedience
At our agency, we work from standards for almost everything, and those standards help lead to avoid the need for strict obedience. While I trust our team to make the right decisions on each project, the standards we set help make sure they stay on the right path.
It again reminds of of the concept of “Commander’s Intent“, which essentially encourages a specific plan of action, but with a focus on the primary goal at the end. If the plan of action needs to change to meet the goal, so be it.
If you have proper standards in place and trust your team to follow them, it avoids both problems:
- You don’t need to micro-manage to ensure obedience.
- When things need to change, it’s easy to allow it to happen.
These two concepts overlap a bit, but it’s almost always better to push for more standards and less forced obedience every chance that you get.
