Yesterday I talked about the importance of pragmatism (good) in your culture. Today, it’s surprises (bad). Surprises—from slipped schedules to resignations—often cause problems and they can happen anywhere, any time. Good people can generally work around problems if deadlines aren’t looming or they have the time to adjust to the situation. Therefore, it’s a cultural matter of very high priority to make sure problems are exposed in time to do something about them. The surprise factor stems from two basic causes:

Problem: People want to prove that they’re competent enough to fix a problem without help, so they don’t report it.
Solution: Acquire information through actions such as management-by-walking-around and process it fully—don’t put your head-in-the-sand. Doing so will help you prepare for most eventualities—and even avoid some of them.

Problem: People believe they’ll be “shot” for making a mistake, therefore they don’t report it.
Solution: Make sure that people are not punished for mistakes, i.e., the messenger is never shot, and they’ll report them much sooner.

The right culture yields the desired result: No surprises.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 10:29 am and is filed under Business info, Communication, Culture, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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