Sabotage Pattern #4: Follow Orders Exactly & Never Ask WHY?

Image © MarineCorps NewYork, https://www.flickr.com/photos/nycmarines/

Never question any orders you get. After all, you are in the company do execute, not to think about stuff. Thinking is best left to the managers and generally people up the corporate ladder. They are the ones with high salaries, high responsibility and So, fulfill any orders you get without questions and to the letter.

Blindly following orders places all the decision-making power on your superiors. Even in the (highly unlikely) case they are really geniuses, bad decisions will inevitably happen. And that will slow the company down, anger your clients and de-motivate your colleagues.

Remember that even if your superiors are really great people, one great person telling 100 others what to do is much less than 100 “normal” people sharing information, collectively participating in the decision-making process and then taking action.

The major reasons for this are:

1. Group wisdom is more than the sum of individual contributions because they all bring their unique knowledge and experience into the process and through collaboration and constructive criticism, these are merged into the best ideas possible.
2. If people are told what to do, they tend to switch their brains off to a certain degree. This of course does not happen instantly, but it drastically limits any possibility of innovation.
3. People participating in any decision-making process will be more motivated to see the decision through. The reason is they see it as their own decision and they understand it, as opposed to seeing it as their manager's decision.

I know better than all of you

At a large company, a new C-level manager came in. He was indeed a very smart guy and had a decent background in both engineering and management.

However, shortly after he came, he began directing all the engineers and telling them what to do — what frameworks should they use, how should they write the code and similar stuff. It went to the extreme that this guy, co-leading a department of couple of hundred people, began reviewing code commits.

Very soon, the engineers stopped thinking about the problems and just did what has been ordered. This resulted in some poor designs and other development problems, as even this guy was good, he could not match the knowledge and experience of dozens of developers.

Recognition

• How often do people question what has been suggested by management (or by others)?
• What is the decision-making process? Are people allowed to decide how they are going to accomplish their jobs, or do they get it prescribed?
• Do managers encourage questions and lead with goals and intents? Or do they simply dictate what should be done and assign tasks?
• How often, when retrospecting a problem or failure, some of the engineers either directly or indirectly admit they knew about the problem, but just didn’t want to bring their concerns upfront?

Removal

• If you are the “doer”: start questioning the decisions being made. Be careful not to judge the decisions, but to ask with the intent to understand the why behind them.
• Encourage others to also adopt a questioning. Never assume that you have the ultimate solution to a problem.
• If you are the manager: allow everyone to decide how are they going to do their job. Probably, those people know what needs to be done and how. And if they don't, why did you hire them?
• Ultimately, delegate decision-making to the people doing the work. Move the authority down to their level as well. Use tools like the ladder of leadership or the delegation poker to agree which decisions will be made in what way.