Happy Ostara: Owner Infallability

The origins of Easter are lost to history. I don’t mean the Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, or even the Jewish holiday of Passover which it matches on the calendar. In fact, the name Easter is a derivative of the Saxon holiday celebrating the goddess Oastare or Eostre, who influenced fertility.

Some mythologists say that the Ancient Greeks’ traditional sacrifice at the Spring Equinox to Artemis, the goddess of hunting and childbirth, included a hare for good hunting and an egg for fertility.  Rabbits and eggs have been associated with fertility since prehistoric times. That tradition survives today in the Easter Bunny.

So much of what we do is grounded in what came before. In running a business, we face the ongoing danger of teaching employees to follow procedures long after we’ve forgotten the reasons for doing something in a particular way. We try something, it is successful, and we make it policy.

There are many versions of the idea that success is a poor teacher. One is epitomized in the conversation between the young entrepreneur and his successful mentor.

“How do you avoid making bad decisions?” the mentor is asked. “Experience” he answers.

“How did you get all that experience?” “Lots of bad decisions.”

Any business owner carries the burden of employee expectations. They expect that we know all the answers, or at least we should. We teach people how we want each job done. In a small business, the owner probably wrote both the job descriptions and the procedures for accomplishing each critical task.

I don’t know any owners who really think that they are infallible, but it is a creeping threat. When employees look to you for all the creativity, for every new idea  and process, it’s easy to fall into the infallibility trap. “I said it, because I KNOW. Because I know, it has to be right. If I am always right, you shouldn’t change it.”

Just because an employee shouldn’t have the ability to change procedures on a whim doesn’t mean that you can’t. It is your job to experiment, to seek constant improvement. Don’t get caught in the trap of letting employees tell you that you aren’t following procedure. Instead, look at why you aren’t complying with your own process. Is it too difficult or complicated? Is the way you are doing it an improvement?

Of course, sometimes we don’t comply with our own procedures because we are confident that we don’t need the controls and checks on quality that we insist on for everyone else. That’s just another version of the infallibility complex.