Everyone gets an 'A'!

What if we approached our new employees like authors of the book 'The Art of Possibility' by Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander who reminded their music students that everyone had straight As at the beginning of each semester?

Transcript

Welcome back to my podcast Scaling Out!

Remember Oprah giving away cars in her talk show ‘You get a car & you get a car!’, I just have to yell ‘You get an A & You get an A!’ Now you are thinking, why is Angela giving out A’s, we aren’t in school any longer, we don’t get A-F grades now.

Today I wanted to share my favorite management book ‘Art of Possibility’ by Benjamin Zander and his wife Rosamund Stone Zander. Well, its not really a management book but a life book. But some of their advice has resonated with me for years. The biggest is about Everyone getting an A.

See, Benjamin is a music teacher so speaking about grades comes naturally. But he uses this statement to remind his students that at the beginning of the class year, they all have straight A’s. They are at their max potential scores in the class, they are awesome, they can keep the A all year! This helps build the student’s confidence which is a must in music. A non-confident musician will make significantly more mistakes than a confident one.

What if we did this in business? If you hire a new resource and make the decision that they have an A from the beginning, does that change your approach to management? I believe it does by giving the employee your trust, you remove barriers and allow them to exhibit the best of themselves. I’m not suggesting a completely hands off approach. Every new resource needs training, guidance, mentoring & support to get fully up to speed on the new job. Let the employee show you how awesome they are, give them the framework for asking for more guidance, allowance for failures, and time to interact with you for further advice & guidance.

But what if you start from a position that assumes the employee is too new to provide value, too risky to give assignments? You are assuming from the beginning that the new resource is going to need extra support, that they aren’t amazing yet. New employees have other experience that could assist with your team’s group, but you could hamstring their ideas by dictating how it is done here. You also end up deploying micro-management techniques, such as giving small tasks/assignments and checking in frequently to see how things are doing. All of this can cut the employee’s potential at their knees by reducing their confidence. When this happens, the employee takes that much longer to move into more senior roles in the group because they were never given the space to build their confidence.

These discussions with your employee start with your 1-1s. So the next set of episodes will explore new hire 1-1s and expectations from the employee & the manager.

Until then, stay safe everyone!