Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
Expect a person to fail, and sooner or later they will. If you have a process that assumes incompetence, designed to protect the company from mistakes, then you are enabling incompetence to persist in your organization.
Expect a person to succeed, treat them as if they will succeed, give them what they need to succeed, give them an environment where mistakes are learning opportunities, not failures, and they will almost always succeed. Those that can’t will be readily apparent, and can be removed from the team, if they don’t remove themselves.
What do you need to provide to a person and/or a team in order to help them be successful?
- Training. If they don’t understand the process, they can’t follow the process, and success will be harder to come by.
- Tools. If delivery matters, the tools needed for delivery matter. Get them what they need to succeed.
- Leadership. If the business doesn’t provide direction at the pace that the team needs it, the team / process will fail.
- Empowerment. A team that is just following orders will gladly do as they are told, even if it is wrong. Make them responsible for delivery by empowering them to deliver, give them ownership over what they are delivering, and they will let you know if they see problems in what they were asked to do.
- Protection. Protect teams and individuals from the things that lead to failure, such as being spread too thin by too many meetings or projects, or spending an excessive amount of time justifying their existence through reporting.
This list is not exhaustive, of course…