Compliance Kills Initiative

A compliance culture is old school. An initiative culture is new school. When it comes to job enjoyment, organizational morale, and increased productivity, new school is better than old school; initiative is better than compliance.

Compliance has to do with rules, regulations, policies, and procedures. These are not bad in and of themselves, but when they dominate and lead to the slow death of personal initiative, they are very much counter-productive and kill creativity and innovation, which are at the heart of any organization’s longevity.

We need both compliance and initiative. Top-down to keep vision and values in place and bottom-up to generate new ideas and solutions to vexing problems. Too much compliance kills imaginative initiative.

Here are a few thoughts on how, as a leader, you can keep healthy compliance, while at the same time creating and fostering a culture of initiative.

Creating & Fostering a Culture of Initiative

The following concepts are adapted from the magazine Bits and Pieces:.

The more freedom you give people to do their jobs the way they want, the more satisfaction they’ll get from their work. If leaders insist on doing all the thinking for their organizations, if everything has to be done their way, what’s left for the people who work for them to dream about and create?

Unfulfilled people can be just as serious a problem as ineffective methods.

How much personal satisfaction can there be in doing a job that is completely programmed, where your muscles or brain are used to perform repetitive operations already planned and dictated by someone else? There ought to be something in every role and job that is satisfying to the person who does it. Unfulfilled people can be just as serious a problem as ineffective methods.

Here are four ideas used by successful leaders:

1. Agree on the end results. Give people a clear idea of your expectations and the results you want to achieve. Leave the methods to them.
2. Suggest methods rather than dictate them, with the understanding that people are free to devise something better.
3. Consult people affected by a problem or a proposed change and ask their ideas, regardless of whether you think you need them or not.
4. Enrich jobs by delegating decisions and fostering initiative as far down the line as possible.

If a worker is capable of being trained to make a certain decision intelligently, why refer it to a supervisor?  If a supervisor is capable, why refer it to someone above?

Creating a climate of initiative and empowerment that gives people some independence, without losing control, takes a lot of leadership skill—but it’s worth it.