think of it as teaching judgment.
by ed mendlowitz
202 questions and answers: managing an accounting practice
question: recently a colleague asked me: “how do you teach judgment?” and before i could respond, he answered it himself with “you can’t teach judgment!”
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response: 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 their 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 – and that is usually their bosses’ fault. it could be their fault if they want to be positioned to grow and they aren’t given the opportunity and they don’t reach out for that opportunity. then they remain in that dead-ended position without trying to better it. putting that aside, it is their boss’ fault for not seeing that they get the proper experience to be able to exercise reasonable judgment to get as much work as possible done at lower levels.
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, or a bank loan called, but mistakes come from exercising judgment, and so does growth and responsibility. experience comes from the exposure and learning from mistakes.
p.s.: people learn and absorb relative to their exposure, their attention and awareness, role models, how they seek out learning and growth openings and their frames of reference. as a boss or supervisor, you need to manage each of these opportunities for growth.