Teaching Judgment!
Recently, a colleague asked me: “How do you teach judgment?” and answered it himself with “You can’t teach judgment!”
Everyone working for you has and uses judgment – they have homes, families, organizations they belong to and they manage their career. Each of these requires exercising judgment many times a day. They all have judgment.
What they might not have at work is experience and the empowerment to use their judgment.That is usually their boss’ fault. It could be their fault if they are supposed to be, or want to be, positioned to grow, they aren’t given the opportunity and don’t reach out for that opportunity. Then, they remain in that “dead-end” position without trying to better it. Putting that aside, it is their boss’ fault for not seeing that they get the proper opportunities to be able to exercise reasonable judgment.
The boss, who is the one to complain about their direct report not exercising judgment, is the culprit. Their subordinate has not been given the opportunity of exposure to accumulate the experience to be able to make the right decisions most of the time, and where they have, they have not been empowered to make it – even if it is a wrong decision. The mistakes are where they will learn. They should not be put in the situation where a client can be lost, a bank loan can be called or a production run ruined, but mistakes come from exercising judgment, growth and responsibility.Experience comes from learning from those mistakes.
People learn and absorb relative to their opportunities, their attention, role models, what they know and their frames of reference.
Make the habit of empowering judgment part of your culture.
How Can We Help?
