Message of the Day - Knowledge Trumps Position

Good Morning,

 

Continuing in my reading of ‘Made to Stick’ (http://www.madetostick.com/blog/) in the section called ‘Stories’ there was a story of a nurse in a hospital’s neonatal unit who saw a baby on a ventilator turn a bad shade of blue. When the medical team came, they started to treat the baby for a collapsed lung. The nurse’s gut told her it was something with the baby’s heart. She then told the Doctor who came in to treat the baby and handed him the tools for treating the heart and not the lung. It saved the baby’s life.

 

This nurse bucked the chain of command because she had better knowledge than the leadership at the top of the chain. This sounds almost like heresy in our world of organizations, but in reality it is just a change of perspective from another commonly used concept.

 

Leading from the front lines, or rather letting the front lines, or most experienced and knowledgeable person make the decision on a matter is common. Colin Powell leads this way, and so do many other great leaders who surround themselves with people smarter than they are.

 

Now that we have people who are better at a lot of what we do working for us, would we still see it as heresy for one of these people to trump our diagnosis of a situation with what they see with their greater experience and knowledge?

 

If we try to ‘pull rank’ when our best says we do not have the right answer and they feel they do, we can cause an awful lot of problems. First we are wasting a valuable resource in the people working for us. Second, we are telling those people that we don’t care that they know more, we are the boss. And most important, this demoralizes those key assets, in that they will less likely get us the correct information when we need it most and often will start looking to leave.

 

When we are the boss, the leader, the manager, we have to be able to defer to their greater knowledge and trust that making ourselves vulnerable to our team will not undermine the team. In most cases, it will have the opposite effect. The team will step up even more knowing that they are trusted and cared about.

 

Remember, knowledge often trumps position.

 

Enjoy!

 

Sanford Berenberg

Sanford@berenberg.net

http://www.berenberg.net

http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/

502-533-9336

 

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