Teaching Workers How To Make Their Own Decisions

As a leader in your organization you invariably have workers underneath you and You may recall times when workers complained that they weren't even allowed to think. "Just do it the way you are told," summed up the prevalent limits within which employees were allowed to operate. Now of course, employees are encouraged to make independent decisions. However, there's still a good deal of worker hesitancy to exercise this freedom.

As a result, you may find yourself actively involved in getting some of your workers to make more decisions on their own. This is to be expected because not all employees will have the same degree of confidence when it comes to directing their own job efforts. Some would prefer the security of talking things over and getting suggestions and direction from their boss. This is fine to a point. After all, not all employees have the same experience, skill levels, and training. As a consequence, some workers are better able to operate independently than others. For this reason, you have to learn how to gradually boost the confidence of those who experience difficulty in working without a lot of guidance.

It helps in this regard to walk people through the decision-making process. Show them how to use a process of elimination to come up with the best way to proceed in what they are working on. For example, if an employee has trouble making decisions on the priority of different projects he or she is working on, go through the process of how such a choice can be arrived at.

When you're trying to encourage employees to exercise more independent judgment, gradually delegate projects of increasing responsibility to them. You will find that some workers are better able to work on their own than others; therefore, try to assign projects with this in mind.

One of the hardest tasks for any supervisor is performing the balancing act that's required when you encourage workers to assume more responsibility. On the one hand you don't want to leave them scratching their heads in trying to figure out what to do next. On the other hand, you don't want to handhold since this will discourage them from learning to act independently. You still want to be available to assist, but you don't want to step in to make decisions unless it's necessary to do so. The trick here essentially involves steering the worker in the right direction without doing the work yourself.