Lauren and I were able to sneak away for a date night recently for one of our favorite activities, wine tasting, and randomly sat with a guy in an open seating format that turned into the 3 of us sitting and talking for 3 hours sharing some of Champagnes finest in addition to stories about work and life. One of them was a lesson about the power of personal agency that I will never forget
He shared that he recently retired after 40 years from a large publicly traded company. I asked him how that 4-decade journey was for him. His CCD response was “well I made it 40 years..” Then he hit us with the truth.
On his way out the door, he told the President of his business unit that he had more personal agency and ability to make decisions at 23 when he was making $14,000 a year then he had in the last 5 years of his career. As the company grew, decision making ability was slowly removed from those closest to the problem and with it the opportunity for some highly talented people to lead and learn their way through opportunities and challenges in front of them.
He shared a CCD framework to fight against this problem that I thought was midwestern magic:
- Let people closest to the opportunity and/or problem make the decision on what to do about it.
- These people, especially early in their career, must have the opportunity to learn from these decisions to get better. The leaders must support their journey without removing the opportunity to learn from the work itself.
- If these people continually make bad decisions, leaders must address and correct. If that pattern continues, that’s the time to make a change and give someone else a shot to learn their way into the role.
My CCD learning: Put our people in a position to have personal agency of their learning curve through empowering them with opportunities and the ability to learn from their decisions.
He ended with a story about his son becoming a foreign war correspondent at the ripe age of 30 and has been covering all the major wars in the last 18 months on the ground. I asked him how he felt about that. He said from the earliest of ages he fully supported his son to pursue his passions as long as he had a backup plan. Talk about the instilling personal agency where it’s hardest to do so! More on this in a later post..
Next week I’ll expand upon this concept via a tremendous book written by Ken Iverson, former CEO and Chairman of Nucor. See you for some “Plain Talk” on personal agency then…
BUILT TO LEAD 