The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.
Henry Stimson
It all boils down to trust
I’m more prone to promote informal learning than your average business manager because I think most workers are trustworthy at heart. In my experience, when I set high expectations, workers live up to them. Conversely, when I set low expectations, workers live down to them. Few people are dishonest, unreliable, or insincere unless you treat them as if they were.
I also believe it’s wise to take control by giving control. To the extent that you trust workers to do the right thing, grant them the freedom to do it.
Formality = control
The formality or informality of learning is a control issue.
The more an individual is in control of the learning process, the more informal the learning. The more an institution is in control, the more formal.
How much control you give learners depends on how much you trust them to do the right thing. We trust people we can rely on, and we rely on people when we’re confident of their character and ability.
- Character is a moral judgment. Can I trust you to keep your hand out of the till? Can I trust you to keep at it until it’s completed? Can I trust you with my daughter?
- Ability is a matter of understanding and skill. Are you a good driver? Can you appease an irate customer? Do you know how to use Photoshop?
Distrust
Does the learners have character flaws? If you don’t trust the learners not to stray, you erect guard rails and set boundaries. If you don’t expect them to keep at it until the job is finished, you make them take tests to prove what they learned. If you don’t believe in the learners’ innate desire to excel, you use grades, certificates, and gold stars for as carrots and sticks.
Do the learners have ability? Learners with no experience in a given field don’t understand the lay of the land. These novices not only lack ability, they don’t know what they don’t know. You can’t rely on them to be self-directed so it’s appropriate for someone else to take control of what they’re to learn until they have a basic foundation.
Trustworthy
On the other hand, if you trust the learner, you take down the guard rails, open the borders, and do away with tests and grades.
Freeing learners to take their own paths has several advantages.
- When there’s no final exam, there’s no cap on learning. Your learning continues, driven by your curiosity or gut feel that you need to know more or for the sheer joy of mastery. You never graduate. You’re free to be all you can be.
- Knowing you’re in charge enables you to take pride in accomplishment. Pursuing your own self-interest motivates you; empowerment breeds engagement.
- Trusting people to do what’s right eliminates most of the bureaucratic baggage set up to control learners. You don’t need many police when people don’t act like criminals.
Why be an optimist about the innate goodness of people? Because it works better than the alternative.
Trusting human nature
Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hans Monderman is a Dutch traffic engineer who gained fame for what he didn’t do. Monderman does not like traffic signs. Over-engineering drains things of context. Civic responsibility fades away. Reckless driving ensues. People get hurt.
Monderman was asked to design a bike path for a village. 2,500 children a day would ride on the path. Following his standard routine, he invited the village elders for a walk in another village. There they saw a road with no speed bumps and no chicanes. The lack of signs and obstacles made drivers take responsibility for their actions. Drivers immediately reduced their speed by 10% when alongside the bike path. Eventually, their speed dropped to 50% of what it had been originally, and there it stayed.
Monderman has worked his magic in more than a hundred Dutch communities. He uproots signs. He clears barriers so drivers can easily see pedestrians. Traffic accidents in Holland are 30% of what they were when he began.
Remove the center line from a country lane; people drive more safely. Clutter a road with signs and barriers, and people feel sufficiently protected to drive as fast as they like. Traffic signs indicate a failure of a road’s architecture to communicate context naturally. Hand a traffic engineer a village, and he’ll make it a speedway. Vrrooom, vrrooom.
Monderman says that if you treat people like fools, they act like fools. Take off the training wheels; they drive like grownups.
Most schools and training departments distrust their patrons
Being told to take a training course is like driving on a road with signs, stripes, and bumps. If a worker takes a training course but doesn’t learn, what’s her reaction? “The training wasn’t any good.”
Instead of training, what if you tell the worker what she needs to know how to accomplish the job? Offer a variety of ways to get up to speed, from treasure hunts to finding information on the from the company’s social network. This makes the learner take responsibility. There’s no longer an excuse for not learning.
Open up a training course at your company. How many inane signs do you see? Some of them are equivalent to saying, “Here, I don’t trust you to figure this out for yourself.” Schools and training departments doubt their customers’ character or ability, or both.
To make someone a trusted, loyal employee, treat them with trust and respect. If you want workers to be self-motivated and exercise good judgment, give them a challenge and the authority to carry it out.
In a networked world, trust is the most important currency.
Eric Schmidt
Trust is a two-way street. In addition to trusting workers, workers need to trust the organization. Is your organization trustworthy?
Being a Freeing learner is a great thing in my opinion mostly because you can evolve permanently. The sky is the limit and you can become a great professional by doing exactly what you love.
I am reading What is social business really about?. It made me realize that I underplayed the fact that trust is reciprocal. It flows both ways in a relationship.
“Social networks are rapidly transforming the public web into the global village envisioned by McLuhan 13, but the Collaborative Enterprise is less an attempt to leverage the same kind of technologies and collective proliferation inside organizations than an answer to deeper human aspirations by realigning work with our most natural behaviors. The purpose of the Collaborative Enterprise is not only about increasing performance, but about increasing it sustainably, Gilles Lipovetsky explains that:
«Pushed to its limits, this management model leads to an organizational model that isn’t sustainable. It isn’t sustainable, so why? Because today, in our society of individualism and hyper-consumerism, the quest for happiness, for well-being has become something fundamental. And I don’t think that a company can sustainably and efficiently go against men and women primary aspirations.”
To some extent, individual behavior replicates organizational behavior. Thus, setting up the right environment to foster collaboration neither requires only nurturing trust among employees, nor even leveraging management’s commitment to lead by example, but also to restore a reciprocal confidence between workers and organizations. For that, it is necessary, as Rachel Happe says, to provide them with a safe environment to freely express themselves:
«Take a little project, the thing that you need to do, and actually if you’re worried about the public profile of it, take it away into a corner, and sort of work on it where you know if it fails it’s not going to fail, you know, massively, in the full glare of public view. So, in another words create a safe environment.”
Furthermore, many organizational mechanisms, built for profit, have narrowed the spectrum of workers’ aspirations and motivations, and extrensic motivations won’t help much, as they don’t change employees’ perception of the company they work in. Instilling passion, and allowing it to thrive, to change both people’s behaviors and people’s perception of the organization they are part of, is a key driver, as tells John Hagel:
The purpose of the Collaborative Enterprise is not only about increasing performance, but about increasing it sustainably,
«Focusing on just business performance, if you want performance in your business and in an environment where we have increasing pressure, I think all of us need performance and a rapidly improving performance. And from our research at least, you don’t get that without high degrees of passion among your employees, among your workers. So I think part of it has to do with nurturing passion that already exist. There are workers who are passionate about what they do and yet they often find their passion is discouraged and suppressed as opposed to embraced and rewarded.”
Jay,
I love your statement “I also believe it’s wise to take control by giving control”. I have found this to be true both in business as well as parenting. I haven’t heard someone put it like that before, but that’s perfect. Micro managed businesses and homes never reach their true potential.
Mary