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How to help employees to use their initiative.

Most busineess thrive on having their employees take the initiative and to act in an empowered way when faced with a tricky request from a customer. These decisions and actions cannot just come out of a rule book or be taught to employees on a staff or management traning programme. Two recent examples spring to my mind from my recent holiday.
One sitauation arose in the Kango Caves in South Africa when I was on a guided tour to the Regions most fantastic and ancient caves - which have been formed over hundreds of thousands of years through the process of rain water seeping underground to form fantastic stalagmite and stalagtite formations in the cave's rock walls. There are notices everywhere asking visitors to respect the caves and not to touch of break off the rock formations so as not to spoil the site for future visitors. In the first chamber that we stopped at the tour guide was aksed by one of our party if he could sit within one of the formations to have his picture taken. She used her judgement and intitiative and said yes OK provided that no damage was done to the rocks. Unfortunately the visitors in question did not stop at this but they proceeded to get more adventurous and potentially reckless as we all continued further into the caves. This also encouraged others to join in and to do the same thing! This could have led to damage of the rock formations, injury to the visitors and to a "free for all invasion" by irresponsible visitors. Speaking to the Tour guide afterwards she said that she regretted using her discretion in the first place and that in future she would be more strict about enforcing the rules.
The second example was waiting in the plane at Heathrow having arrived home where a passenger had asked to go the bathroom shortly before the approach for our landing and he was refused permission to do so by the Air Steward who quoted the Airlines strict timing rules before landing. However later on while the plane was on the runway and waiting for the tow truck to arrive to tow us onto our stand he then used his initiative to invite the passenger to use the bathroom in the time space before we started moving again. I am sure that this was agaianst the Regulations also but the action diffused a difficult customer situation.
Employees can be asked to learn the rules and be able to quote and use the rules and regulations -but the real skill is to know when to be able to divert from them and to use your discretion in an effective and safe way. Scenario training can help this - but so to too can experience and above all the use of good judgement. To find out more about judgement, empowerment, decision making and risk taking in business then please contact us.