Permission, forgiveness and workplace adulting
The amazing Grace Hopper once said “it’s better to get forgiveness than permission”.
I’ve seen plenty of leaders try to cultivate this philosophy among their teams - often feeling frustrated and wanting them to just crack on with what needs to be done instead of seeking permission and waiting for approval. And I feel it’s an admirable ambition in big bureaucracies with traditions of defensive permission-seeking (aka ass-covering).
I was prompted to think about this from another angle this week though. A service owner friend was telling me how frustrated she is with someone reporting into her - someone who claimed to be “seeking forgiveness over asking permission” when what they were really asking for was full autonomy without accountability. The accountability would stay with the service owner - and that was hard to stomach because her direct report was underperforming, kept “going rogue”, didn’t share what she was doing, and couldn’t stand to receive feedback.
It got me thinking about how “seek forgiveness” as a philosophy depends so much on maturity - of workplace culture, of leaders, of individuals.
They need clear vision and direction - because the work should be aligned with business strategy in pursuit of desired outcomes, irrespective of the level of autonomy someone is given. And because, realistically, there is rarely such a thing as full autonomy - clear red lines and guardrails should be communicated so people can freely working within them. I’ve said in the past that one of my favourite managers told me the only things he wanted sight of related to external comms, money and people - for everything else I had a free rein. That clarity was hugely important for building trust between us.
They need to have the capability to do the work autonomously - and have the knowledge and skills to do the task, or to be a fast learner. Linked to this, they need humility. If they can’t take feedback, or if they assume they’re always right, they’re not going to learn, then they’re not going to learn - and indeed, they might fail to spot the signs of things going wrong and be slow to respond. So they need a high level of emotional intelligence and self-awareness. And a little courage too - because the philosophy only works if they do seek forgiveness - i.e. they can see when they’ve messed up, they fess up, and they deal with the consequences, taking responsibility for issues and problems that arise. The workplace culture itself should provide sufficient psychological safety that people aren’t afraid to take appropriate strategic risks, try new things, and learn through fast, small-scale failure.
There needs to be a great deal of openness between individuals, teams and the wider organisation. No (wo)man is an island - and there’s no sense pretending otherwise. To work well autonomously, individuals and teams need to be actively communicating what they’re doing to people beyond their bubble - they should be “radiating intent” (see Elizabeth Ayer’s article). This gives people the chance to intervene if they spot something going wrong, encourages collaboration on related work, and can help grow confidence in the “radiators’” capabilities and judgement. People working autonomously need to not just to radiate outward, but also be taking in and responding what’s going on around them; and high transparency cultures help people working in siloes more quickly detect the intended and unintended impact of their work, moderating the institutional obliviousness that siloes often generate.
If these facets of maturity aren’t there, then “seek forgiveness” isn’t likely to work.
And I believe that’s why comfort with these ways of working will varies so massively across organisations and between leaders. It’s rare to find it as a culture permeating a line management chain, let alone an entire organisation. Where I have seen it work, it was been in pockets only - where an individual leader has decided to create this freedom for her team, despite it not existing above her.
My favourite service director is known for creating a reality distortion field around her teams, a cultural bubble of 80-odd folks with the clarity, courage, communication and confidence to get things done without much bureaucracy, because they know she has their back if things go wrong. This puts her in a vulnerable position and it has been hard-going assuaging her boss’s or peers’ concerns about the effectiveness or propriety of the approach - this doesn’t match how management, governance and assurance works elsewhere in the organisation so folks get antsy. It takes courage to create psychological safety for her teams when she doesn’t yet have it herself. This is the ultimate in workplace adulting. But she does it anyway and it works, and the organisation now trusts her despite their anxieties, because her teams get stellar results.
So how do we scale courage?