The latest from David:

We had an interesting session on the subject of common sense at the Growing for Gold event in York.  In the leadership workshop, we were discussing why some managers find it hard to trust and to delegate to the people who work for them. There were many reasons that the group came up with. Some of them valid and some of them not but all, we agreed, related to the belief that managers had about the people they needed to delegate to. If I was to summarise this belief in one sentence it would be, ‘I would delegate more but my team don’t have enough common sense and they might make a mistake.’  Ok, this was not said word for word but it sums up the direction of the conversation.

So, how do you build common sense? Ironically the answer we came up with was to allow people to make mistakes and [most importantly] to learn from them. After all how do we learn? How many children learned to ride a bike by reading the book of theory?! I guess the answer is ‘not many!’. Most children learn by figuring out that staying on hurts less than falling off. Most children learn to fill up a cup by overfilling it and then re-calibrating next time… they build their common sense from mistakes and, if they have really smart parents, also learn from other people’s mistakes.

In business there would clearly be some mistakes that you would not be wise to invest in but as a leader are you and your people clear about the mistakes that people are allowed to make and what the process is for learning from them? Do you also encourage people to learn from each other’s mistakes? A simple ‘likes’ and ‘prefers’ session at the end of a day/week/project can be enough as long as you go into it with a belief that mistakes are a great way to build up common sense.

A prize for the first leader who genuinely believes (and says to me): I need to trust my people to make more mistakes this year!