CHAPTER 23 CHOICE

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling¹

Choice is the right or ability to choose between different things. Choice is a small word that encompasses much that makes us human. Choice equates to freedom – and we always have choice, whatever the circumstances – even if we don’t like what we are experiencing, or don’t have as much freedom as we would like. This powerful insight was shared so clearly by Viktor Frankl:²

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Choice is important to us as human beings. And life now is all about choices – in fact, we are overwhelmed by choice in all contexts, though we’re not always aware of the choices we do have.

In our experience, people respond more positively when they have a choice, when they are involved in defining the course of action rather than being presented with exactly what they have to do.

Curiously, there is a biological basis for the positive impact of choice. Personally making a choice stimulates a part of your brain (the caudate nucleus) that responds in a similar way when we have sex, feel love or eat chocolate.³ Dr Tali Sharot speculates that our brains evolved this mechanism to reinforce our commitment to our choices. Powerful stuff!

At the other end of the scale, there is startling evidence about the consequences of perceiving no choice. Employees in low-control jobs – jobs where people have to respond to others’ demands and timetables with no control or freedom to decide how they respond – have twice the risk of coronary heart disease, and live shorter lives (on average) than workers in high-control positions.⁴

Having choice is linked to greater engagement and well-being, while having very limited choice but lots of “demands” is linked to greater experience of stress and ill health.

WHAT DOES CHOICE DO FOR US?

Choice in the moment has a biological basis – giving us a short-term neural “high”. From neuroscience and studies of habit formation, we know when we make the similar choices in similar contexts, we’re building strong habits and neural connections that limit our awareness of alternative choices.

“We are our choices.”

Jean-Paul Sartre⁵

If, as a project leader, you are always providing the answers to your project team when they come to you for advice, then it’s harder to switch to an approach that encourages them to engage their own brains and find the answer themselves. When you are promoted so that you are running five projects in parallel, your choice to be the one who has the answers to all the difficulties and challenges encountered will ensure that you get really bogged down and become a bottleneck, reducing the chance of successful delivery. You can feel really stuck because you have become the person with all the answers – that is part of your personal identity, the value that you see you add – and you expect that that is what others want from you. The blinkers are on – and yet, you have to change to survive.

Raising your awareness to look at some of the alternative choices available to you and choosing a different kind of response to the queue of people at your desk will not only free you up and ensure your survival, it will develop the capability and motivation of those working on the projects.

Choice is a motivator – providing greater commitment to a course of action. In cultures where self-expression is more highly valued, having a choice is particularly important – leading to greater ownership of the choice made.⁶ Once we’ve made a decision, we are then ego-bound to defend that decision (for better or worse) – which means we’ll invest our energy into the choice we’ve made.

In this way, we become intrinsically motivated to make our decision the right one. This not only provides a positive feeling about the decision we’ve made, but brings a level of energy to make it happen.

Take for example the team leader, Linda, who is keen to delegate a particular client presentation. Imagine Linda asks a team member, Joe for help in creating an engaging and impactful presentation to the client – she’s going to have to let Joe shoulder much of the responsibility for the content and impact of the presentation – with minimal input on the first and final drafts. She shares one or two examples of successful presentations in the past and what the purpose of the presentation is. Would he be prepared to take it on – does he have the space to take it on?

Consider a different scenario – where Linda tells Joe that he needs to do this presentation for a client – she doesn’t care what else he has to deliver, this presentation is a priority. She would like him to give her frequent updates about progress and she needs full sign-off on the final version.

Which approach is going to make Joe feel he has choices? Which one is going to leave Joe feeling motivated? Which one is going to bring out more of Joe’s resourcefulness in creating the presentation?

When put like this, it’s easy to see the contrast between the “choice” and “no choice” conditions and to feel the impact of the two approaches.

Giving others more choices also requires you to acknowledge that perhaps someone here is able to do this as well as you, better than you, or differently to you. Getting past the small pain of acknowledging that you are not omnipotent and absolutely indispensable pays dividends.

Choice builds learning and capability. Providing a choice about what to do builds people’s capability to take the initiative and build their learning. Providing the answer to each query builds dependency (on you). Giving people the chance to use their judgement in applying their knowledge and skills enables them to learn and grow.⁷

Choice defines us. What we choose defines us as people, it defines who we are. Choice gives us power and the opportunity for mastery. Choice also comes with a large helping of responsibility. Making choices and accepting the responsibility that comes with that choice is a part of personal growth and maturity. If we consciously choose a path for ourselves rather than following a path that has been mapped out for us (it may be the very same path), we are taking responsibility for ourselves – we are no longer the victims of a seemingly unfair world.

When you’re given choices, it’s harder to blame “the organization” (or anyone) when things don’t go the way you want them to. You can do something about it by making a different choice. By providing choices, you are enabling others to lead themselves.

“To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.”

Patrick Ness⁸

Choice equates to freedom – not the freedom to do exactly what we please regardless of consequences, but the choice to act, mindful of the consequences, and the freedom to find inner peace and well-being whatever happens.

CHOICE AND AWARENESS

It’s worth saying something about the combination of choice and awareness. If we are not aware of the range of choice on offer, we inevitably limit ourselves and our possible impact or outcomes we might reach. Choice and awareness, then, go hand in hand. While it’s pretty impossible to have full awareness, we can choose to increase our awareness or provide those that are working with us with greater awareness.

In scenario one with Linda and Joe above, Linda gives Joe greater choice, and she shares the parameters: the purpose of the presentation (what it’s there to do); how she wants people to feel (impact and engaging); and she provides some examples of what good might look like. In scenario two, Linda provided no resources.

The starting point to increasing your choices is raising awareness – and the decisions to pause, reflect, consider, be curious, rests with you. Throughout this book, we have endeavoured to raise your own personal, interpersonal and contextual awareness – to offer you greater awareness of the choices and consequences of choices at your disposal.

BUILDING THE POSSIBILITY OF CHOICE INTO ORGANIZATIONS

Do you really believe in the power of choice? At a hotel we worked with, vacancies from local competitors were posted on notice boards with the objective of the employees understanding that they were in a good place… and encouraging them to remake that positive choice to stay.

The story of Aruba Networks shares how they used to spend a lot of time and energy tracking and reporting vacations. Today they simply tell every employee to take a vacation when they need it, for as long as they need it, and the only proviso is that they have to make sure that the time off won’t interfere with the work getting done.⁹

Bold approaches.

There is a lot you can do to build the possibility of choice into the fabric of your organization. We discuss clarity, culture and work design as three ways that you can increase the possibility of choice through raising awareness and embedding choice into processes and structures.

Clarity

Clarity on your part enables others to make an informed choice. Being clear that what you’re offering potential employees is more than just the transactional details (pay, reward, holiday entitlement, working hours etc); your purpose as an organization and how you operate (your organizational values) are likely to make the difference where two organizations are competing for the best recruits. This clarity will make those that make the choice to work with you more committed from the start and less likely to suffer unexpected and uncomfortable “shocks”.

Clarity is not just something that happens in the recruitment process, but is something to pay attention to throughout the organization. While clear organizational values and a guiding purpose act as an ongoing anchor, the answers to the questions “What purpose does this activity serve?” and “How do you want this to feel or impact?” can go a long way to building clarity when delegating. Clarity is part and parcel of your culture.

Culture

To what extent is the culture of your organization geared to maximizing awareness and engaging and empowering employees where possible?

As an example, what culture do you have around providing feedback? Is feedback a once-a-year event associated with the performance appraisal (an extreme example)? Or is feedback a daily occurrence – as and when required, with a strong level of appreciation for what was done well and what would lead to further improvement? A culture which promotes clarity about how well people are doing within a given context provides people with more choices.

If a person knows that they are coming across aggressively during project meetings, they can choose to maintain the current approach, choose a different style of interaction or choose to build a broader repertoire of interpersonal skill. If they are not made aware of their impact on others, they have no basis on which to make a different choice.

A culture which supports leaders to build confidence and selfdetermination is based on three core principles: choice, decision latitude and personal accountability.¹⁰

Does your organizational culture reflect a sense of goodwill, or one of fear and mistrust? A more “trusting” culture in general will lead to greater sharing and more appropriate sharing of information and responsibility. As you grow confidence around enabling choice, you can provide more meaningful choice over more substantive issues. A fearful, mistrusting culture will lead people to use knowledge and information as power, as a bargaining chip, reducing the level of openness and, ultimately, the level of engagement.

Whether you ultimately have more control and power over your day or not (you still have to go to work and deliver certain objectives), building greater choice into business as usual will reduce your experience of stress and the negative effects that that has on your body.¹¹ Belief that you have greater control through greater choice will make you healthier.

Work design

The research evidence around choice and the impact of having more or less choice on our motivation, well-being and mortality that has been gathered over decades and across countries weighs in favour of providing employees with greater latitude. The research suggests that “traditional” command/control approaches will not deliver optimal outcomes – for the organization or the individual.

Command control from the centre does not deliver the required level of agility and speed of response. There has been a move from standardization to individuation and because of this, employees at the point of service delivery are best placed to understand what needs to be done in any given situation. Responsive service and extra employee efforts emerge when people have the necessary leeway to meet customer needs and sufficient authority to serve customer wants.

How can we drive choice down to the front line and control to the person who is well-placed to make a sensible choice? To feel in control of their own work lives, people need to be able to take non-routine action, exercise independent judgement, and make decisions that affect how they do their work, without having to check with someone else.¹²

This does not equate to an absence of leadership; greater leadership is required. But instead of the leader being focused on being personally brilliant, it’s about the business leader and leaders of people throughout the organization clarifying the space within which decisions can effectively be made. Clarifying the boundaries and the scope of decision latitude requires a leader to be truly leading, rather than simply reacting from a more informed position. Clarifying the scope of responsibility for others enables the brilliance of others to come to the fore.

Enabling choice and offering greater latitude through the design of work means that you are building the habits of making choices, adaptability, accountability and flexibility into your workforce. Given the emergent, complex and dynamic global context, greater flexibility will pay dividends.

Enabling choice in an organization means being creative and flexible – where you can. It’s clearly not always possible to be flexible, but our guess is that there is much more scope than currently exists or you may even imagine.

CHOICE AND 31PRACTICES

The theme of choice runs through the 31Practices approach from beginning to end. To start with, the process begins with co-creation workshops for employees to suggest the specific Practices that they consider would best represent their organizational values and set their organization apart from the competition.

From these workshops, a first draft of the 31Practices is created and reviewed before fine tuning and a formal launch – again, employees across the organization have a chance to contribute to the review.

When the 31Practices are in operation, employees choose the specific way that they are going to fulfil the Practice of the day. For example, if in a hotel the Practice is “We display meticulous attention to cleanliness”, the receptionist may choose to clear out a cupboard, the engineer when checking the boiler may choose to sweep the plant room, the chef may choose to book the degreasing of the filter, the bar supervisor may choose to check that the glasses are all sparkling.

The 31Practices are owned by the organization and, more importantly, the people that are the organization. The behaviour is therefore authentic and directed towards enabling the organization’s greater purpose, in line with organizational values.

“Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with.”

Brodi Ashton¹³