Doing your job, or hiding behind it?
Readtime: 3.5 minutes
On Sunday night a stranger made my 7-year-old nephew drink his own water to make sure it wasn’t vodka.
We were at a West End theatre for a youth theatre company’s show. The whole place had been taken over for the night. The performers ranged from 3 years old up to their late teens. My older nephew, who’s 9, was one of them, which is why we were there. He was already backstage by the time we arrived.
The audience was almost entirely family members. Primarily parents who had come to watch their own child sing a few lines and then spend the rest of the show trying to spot them in the crowd scenes.
The three of us heading in to watch were me, my mum, and my younger nephew. On the way in, a security woman on the door checked our bags. She made him drink from his bottle, to prove it was water. I thought this was a bit odd.
My mum is 79. My nephew is 7. None of us, I can confirm, were out on the smash.
The rule was standing in for something
I don’t think the woman did anything wrong, exactly. She did what she’d been asked to do.
The rule is obvious enough. No outside drinks. Most theatres have it. And for a normal Friday night show it makes complete sense, because the bar is how the venue makes its money.
The trouble is that a rule is only ever a stand-in. And the moment you make a 7-year-old prove his water isn’t vodka, the purpose it was standing in for has gone. And there were no bar takings to protect from a child’s water bottle, as water was available freely inside anyway.
In one sense she was doing her job. In another, she was running the procedure and skipping the part that actually needed her, which was to look at who was in front of her and notice that the rule didn’t really apply here.
And I understand that behaviour. If she’d waved us through and something had gone wrong, that would have been on her. If she follows the rule to the letter, nothing is ever on her. “I checked everyone the same way” is a complete defence. It protects the person doing the checking, whatever the situation is in front of them.
So following the rule was the safe choice. And we all make those. When the rule is the easier option rather than judgement, most of us reach for the rule.
All the information, none of the permission
Here, there was no real cost to any of this.
But the same move, made elsewhere, isn’t always so harmless.
Think about who was on that door. She could see exactly what was going on: the grandparents, the excited siblings, nobody trying to get one over on the venue. She had everything she needed to make a sensible call. She just wasn’t allowed to make it.
That pattern is everywhere. In a lot of organisations, the rules are rigid at the bottom and flexible at the top. The people closest to the work can see exactly what’s needed and have the least room to act on it. The people furthest from it get to use their judgement freely.
There’s a longer-term cost to this. Tell capable people often enough that the rule matters more than their judgement, and they slowly stop offering it. It’s still there, they just keep it to themselves, or moan about it with their co-workers.
So you end up with something odd. A company full of people who could tell you exactly what’s needed, all behaving as if they couldn’t. And almost none of them are being lazy or difficult. They’ve just learned that the safe move is to wait to be told.
None of which means rules are the problem. You can’t run a theatre, or a business, on “everyone use your own judgement”. Some consistency is the point. But there’s an absurdity in hiring people for their judgement, then building a system that teaches them not to use it.
The thing I’m pondering is how easy it is to do the rule, and feel like you’ve done the job. Or to see the rules being followed, and think the job is being done.
If you lead a team, the uncomfortable part is how healthy this can look from where you sit. The rules are followed. Your team goes along with things. But a team that rarely pushes back might just be one that’s stopped offering the judgement you’re paying for.
If you’ve got some thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them. Just hit reply.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
P.S. If you know someone who might appreciate reading this, please send it their way. And if you’ve particularly like it, please let me know!