Involve others
Wadsworth loves Battelle, but he’s not omniscient about what happens at the company. Not when the company is doing $5.6 billion in annual research and development and interacting with more than 800 governmental agencies and contacts from more than 130 locations around the world.
But whether your business is large or small, you need the help of your people to make it all happen and help you do your job.
“I have some very good advisers,” Wadsworth says. “If one of them says, ‘Look, you really need to do something,’ I do it. If not, they are not valuable in the room. It’s more of a conversation and we often arrive at consensus very quickly with these things.”
It’s those times when you don’t easily reach consensus that the value of your team really shows itself. You need people who will be willing to counter you when you’re shaping your message.
“I have an overall philosophy of vigorous debate followed by agreement,” Wadsworth says. “It doesn’t mean you like the decision, but you’re going to agree with it after having a vigorous deb
ate. If you have vigorous debate, a lot of the poor options will fall away.”
When you don’t have vigorous debate, Wadsworth says you run the risk of ending up with dishonest agreement.
“Dishonest agreement happens when people around the table in the meeting all say, ‘Yes, we agree with that,’” Wadsworth says. “Then they go out in the corridor and say, ‘I don’t know what he was thinking about. That won’t possibly work.’ That’s the most insidious failure mechanism in my mind.”
You need to do your best to constantly remind your people that you want them to speak up if they sense a mistake is being made.
“Everyone is encouraged, and in fact, it’s their responsibility to speak their mind and challenge if they don’t agree,” Wadsworth says. “Great companies avoid dishonest agreement. It’s very dangerous to go out there thinking you’ve got everyone on the same page when you don’t, even though they’ve already told you that they are. That’s something we work very hard on.”
If you sense dishonest agreement occurring in your management team, you need to stamp it out right away.
“Be willing to confront it and say, ‘Look, I thought we had agreements on this. Now I’m told you have a different view,’” Wadsworth says. “‘How is that? Why didn’t we bring that up? What can we do now to encourage everyone to bring up their concerns in the right forum and not keep them inside and work against the team decision?’”
