Page 105 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

92B RE-ENGAGE

employees were second-guessed; this behavior absolutely guts autono-
mous decision making. If we really believe “it’s their company,” we
have to act that way, including when people make decisions.
We’ve hired great people here. Most of them can do their jobs much
better than I can. Why should I second-guess them? Many leaders
make a fatal cognitive error that because a decision turned out badly,
someone has to be at fault. We may spend time reviewing a decision
so we can learn, but we trust people to make good decisions.

Q: Let’s stay on the topic of decision making. You work very
hard at helping your associates learn how to make good deci-
sions on their own.
Karolski: We recently had some of our cooks come to us with an idea
they had about moving a door. This may not seem like a big deal
for most companies—and financially it seemingly wasn’t a great
deal of money—but we took this as an opportunity to help our staff
think about whether moving that door was a good investment of our
money. We asked them to research their request, which actually re-
quired moving some electrical lines and making a structural change.
Elson: They learned a lot more about what goes into making a change
like this, but more important, they learned how to research a problem
and come up with a good decision. The end result of the process was
the cooks decided not to move the door, but the skills they learned can
be used in many ways in the future.
Pearson: I had an employee come to me recently and say, “I want to run
something by you, but I don’t want you to fix it,” and most times I don’t
have to intervene. We encourage this kind of thinking, where we are
acting more in a coaching capacity. In most situations like this we en-
courage our managers to role-play or shadow an employee rather than
jumping in; that’s the easy way, but not the way that develops people.

Q: How do you know all this time and effort helping your as-
sociates embrace these 260 mindsets is paying off?
Hoogeveen: This may sound like an odd example, but just recently,
due to a reorganization, I had to terminate an employee who had