Learning to let things go “wrong.”

April 29, 2014

Filed under: Human Resources,Leadership — jonathanpoisner @ 5:11 pm

One of the trickier challenges facing a nonprofit Executive Director with supervisory responsibilities is leaning to let things go “wrong.”

If you are to empower your staff to have areas of responsibilities and for them to flex their own leadership, they must be allowed to make mistakes. That means giving them authority to make some decisions without prior authorization.

After the decision with which you disagree, usually that means just accepting it and moving on. Sometimes, the situation may be repeated, so you’ll want to discuss the decision and find out what the staff person being supervised was thinking. This should be done by asking questions designed to understand their thinking rather than starting with: “that was a mistake.”

Even if they come to you for advice, sometimes the right answer is: “here’s my initial instinct, but I haven’t thought about it much and its your area of responsibility, so the call is yours.”

The benefit of this approach isn’t just that it gives junior staff a positive work environment in which they’ll develop more leadership skills. And it isn’t just that highly competent staff are less likely to leave your organization if they are given responsibility.

The benefit of this approach is also about how much time the Executive Director can put into their other duties.  If the Executive Director is weighing in on matters that are really the province of someone else on staff, that means the Executive Director is taking time away from their core responsibilities.  Every minute debating some minor potential “mistake” is a minute taken away from fundraising and other core Executive Director job duties.

Of course, sometimes you do need to intervene — on mistakes that would be serious. And serious is a subjective term.

But all in all, I’ve experienced more examples of Executive Directors who over-manage to ensure everything is perfect than the opposite problem of just letting everything slide.   Bottom line: Executive Directors need to learn to let things go “wrong.”

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