In a Tango class recently, I had to follow. I’m much more used to leading, and I kept bumping into people. Not my best moment. But then my instructor said something that turned out to be very wise advice: “close your eyes.” All of a sudden, everything just kicked into place and I was on the other side of a Tango dance, easily imagining how legs can get kicked out and intertwined and how the whole thing just works. It also helped me lead better. I finally understood that you have to be forcefully charging ahead, or you mess up the rhythm of the follower.
The same can be true in business. I used to find that new employees at my old company always had 20 things to tell us that we should be doing better. Most of these things had been tried, or deprecated over time. Many employees came from smaller companies who didn’t need checks, balances, and documentation like we did. Many came from larger companies, who needed a lot of those same checks, balances, and documentation that we did not. Building business processes can be a fine line between not having enough process, and having so much that people can’t get anything done any more, because there aren’t dedicated people (or time for) managing those processes.
The recommendations were sometimes good. But most of the time, after a month or three on staff, the reasons we did things started to make sense and the number of recommendations went down. But those first couple of months could be a challenge, and so when I saw this trend with a new employee I’d always just say “write everything down, and we’ll review it in a couple months – just try it our way for now.”
Once I got into the rhythm of following, I was able to open my eyes. Then, I could show off. Similarly, once my employees got into the rhythm of things, then we could look at their recommendations and see what would make sense for their new job. Some of these recommendations helped to shape the way we did business moving forward, and we were so very glad to have them. But what was gone was all the time spent trying to explain why we chose to do things a certain way. Much simpler for all parties when you can close your eyes and follow, if only for a little while.