The thing about people is that they’re quite unpredictable. You’ll just be cruising along thinking you’ve got them all figured out and then one day, WHAM! you find out they like sauerkraut. There’s no limit to the depravity.
Because people are so unpredictable we’re typically pretty terrible at understanding them. You see, if people were predictable you would know exactly what makes them tick and you could push and pull on the right levers to make the tick, tock.
But you can’t.
Because the thing about people is that they’re unpredictable.
Which means that if you want to understand what drives them and specifically if you want to make places and spaces where they can work to their absolute best, you have to do something that is incredibly difficult. It’s something that managers hate and executives loathe.
You’ve got to talk to them.
Not at them. To them. You might even have to ask them what they think.
We often make decisions on behalf of our teams because we think we know what they want and what they need but when we make these decision in a vacuum, devoid of the individual’s input, we don’t. We just don’t. We don’t know where they want to work. We don’t know how they want to work. We don’t even know IF they want to work.
If we don’t ask, they don’t answer.
Further, sometimes even if we DO ask, they don’t answer. Why? Because we’ve spent years building tools and systems that discourage them from believing that we have any interest in their best interests.
So if you’re looking at designing your organization, in addition to all of the fancy principles and theories and studies and statistics and trends and history of who people are and how they can be motivated to do their best work…
If you don’t get input from the individuals, you don’t have a clue what they need.
Because the thing about people…
is that they’re unpredictable.