Employees Don’t Always Know
(originally published June 23rd, 2005)
Last week, in a meeting, I learned something that was going awry as far as a particular process that was occurring. When I got back to the office, I decided to talk to the people who I figured would have noticed the error. As I was talking to them and telling them my tale, fully expecting them to be as incredulous as I was, one of them said “We don’t know anything about that sort of thing”, and the other person agreed.
I was stunned, but only for a quick moment. I had fallen into one of my own traps, something that I try to tell others to guard against, and proved that even someone who knows certain things might get caught off guard. In essence, I had assumed that just because people were doing a certain job for a very long time that they had knowledge that they didn’t have, or wouldn’t have, because they never had a real reason to learn it.
As managers, sometimes people feel that their employees should just learn things once they’ve been shown a few procedures. The reality is that when you show an employee how to do some things, you pretty much cover the majority of what they’ll ever have to learn to do the job, even if that majority is only at 51%. Some employees will want to know more in order to be more efficient at their jobs; the rest will do as they’ve been taught, and put the blame back on you when you go to them and they don’t know something.
And the truth is that it’s your fault as a manager. It’s always management’s duty to make sure that the people who do the job know everything about the job that they might encounter. The more an employee knows, the better they’ll perform, and the better they’ll make you look. A well trained employee bothers you rarely, which leaves you time to get your own work done.
As a sidebar, the people I was talking to were not front line employees, but it doesn’t matter. In the structure of a large organization, the layers can be so vast that it’s not inconceivable that every person along the way doesn’t know every single thing about their jobs. Even those at the very top rely on others at times to keep them abreast of things.
So, no one knows everything; as a consultant, I guess I need to be happy about that.
