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On
February 21 the HR Society held its 48th Presidents Forum and
welcomed Professor Gillian Stamp, who led a discussion on “Trust and
Judgement in Decision Making”.
Professor Stamp will be known to some HR professionals for her work in
Career Path Appreciation, building on the early work of Elliott Jacques.
She founded BIOSS (Brunel Institute of Social Science), a Foundation
operating all over the world (www.bioss.com).
Gillian
began by talking about “judgement” which we rely on in unfamiliar,
volatile and ambiguous situations. The exercise of judgement is fraught
with uncertainty, she said. It is therefore the responsibility of
leaders to build and maintain a framework, a trellis that can support
and cultivate confidence in the judgement of those who work to them, and
crucially, confidence in their own judgement.
People
all over the world and at all levels in organisations describe a sense
of well-being when their capacity for judgement matches the challenges
they face. They speak of feeling energised, competent, confident in
their capacity to make decisions. This sense of trust in their judgement
is also called being “in flow.” Gillian illustrated this with a graph of
the “scale of challenge” vs the “level of capabilities”, and the
diagonal line from bottom left to upper right indicated being “in flow”.
Below it (capability higher than challenge) we get boredom and
frustration. Above it (the opposite) we get anxiety and perplexity.
The
framework for enhancing confidence in judgement can be thought of as a
tripod on which the leader builds from three complementary and equally
vital activities: tasking, trusting and tending. Leaders manage
this tension through, firstly,
tasking,
a
process that enables the leader to define the limits for judgement and
establish criteria for review by agreeing objectives and resources and
agreeing a completion time.
Once
tasking has established the objectives of the work, the second element
of the tripod,
trusting,
comes
into play. More specifically defined as Leaders send signals about
discretionary trust through shared values and purpose, and people
respond by using their judgement in the light of those values.
Prescriptive trust5
refers to how far people are (and feel they are) trusted to obey the
rules that limit their discretion. Discretionary trust refers to
how far people are (and feel they are) trusted to use their own
initiative and judgement. People are very clear about the differences
between prescriptive and discretionary trust – as one civil servant put
it, “prescriptive trust is trust without space, and discretionary trust
is trust with space.”
The
third element,
tending,
is
the process of maintaining the balance of trust and control. Tending
keeps things working, and the organisation ”in flow.” It monitors
without crowding, is vigilant in attending to both prescriptive and
discretionary trust, and in continuously communicating a sense of
purpose and relevance that enables people to use their judgement to make
adjustments in specific cases on their own initiative. Throughout
history, tending has been the work of slaves, women and great leaders.
Professor Stamp went on to explain how to keep these components in
balance and engendered lively discussion. A copy of her full paper may
be obtained from Sheila Nutt at the HR Society
(sheilanutt@hrsociety.co.uk)
(Article by Andrew
Mayo, President of the HR Society, for the SHR Magazine.)
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