Dumb rules come from lazy leadership

Dumb rules come from lazy leadership

We’ve all worked at organizations where they had some rules that were clearly overkill, or even didn’t make sense at all. Most of these rules can be traced back to an incident in the past, and people say “Oh yes, that rule is because of Steve”.

Rather than management talking to Steve about his behavior, they took the easy way out and just made a new dumb rule for everyone.

My friend Craig was talking about this a few weeks ago and summarized it this way:

“Dumb company rules exist because people do not want to have the hard conversations with the person that the rule was created for”

As Craig shares about his company, which is similar to how we handle things at GreenMellen, they try to have as few rules as possible. They hire people that they trust to make smart decisions, and then they give them the autonomy to do what they think is best. It’s similar to the concept of Commander’s Intent, where you give your team freedom to do what they think is best because we all know what goal we’re chasing together.

It’s not that we have zero rules, or let things go crazy, but a brief conversation about a problem is almost always better than creating some weird new rule to try to solve it.

Craig shared a few more excellent examples of this, and I encourage you to check out the full video (it’s only three minutes long) to hear it from him.