How much choice have you given your team?

I was at an event recently where someone told me that I was projecting my own value system onto others and it was likely that they didn’t want it. The value system I was ‘projecting’ was that all humans should have choice over their lives, and more importantly, that those in situations where choice is limited or not the norm, should be helped to see they have choices and encouraged to use that choice if they want to.  Am I naive to that choice should be a universal human given? I don’t think so.  I have a huge network of business people around me both in my professional network and in my friendship group. I work with business leaders in multiple countries, and I grew up and still live in Cambridge, one of the biggest business hubs of the UK. Innovation, inspiration, and choice were just part of my make-up as I grew up.  I talk about my difficult childhood openly and all the problems it caused, but I was reflecting with a friend that if there were positives in growing up the way I did, one of them was that my mother was a single mother in the early 1970s – the only one in my class when I was at school.

I didn’t go to school much so I never had the cultural and social norms of marriage and the limits on women ingrained into me. It never occurred to me that as a woman I was meant to grow up, get married and have babies (although, ironically, this is exactly what I did to escape my childhood!). My mother didn’t work either, we lived in poverty but I didn’t really notice that at the time as it was normalised to me. The TV my mother watched was 1940s films where women did swoon at the feet of the male star but often these women were feisty and strong characters. I also watched The A-Team, Star Trek and Quantum Leap. I grew up with forward-thinking ideas from Star Trek. It just never occurred to me that I was limited as a woman. I’d say I notice it more now than ever.  I grew up believing that I had choices. I had autonomy. I’ve always been very aware of people less fortunate than me, who didn’t.  The person I was talking to said that the country needs people who are happy to be cleaners and bus drivers and refuse collectors and that if we encouraged everyone to think big, we wouldn’t be able to function as a society. (I took a huge breath here before replying!) While I totally agree that the job you want to do should be your choice, it’s all in that word for me – choice. My suggestion to this person was that some people may love being cleaners or bus drivers or lawyers but that they still have the right to be offered choice – and especially when they have grown up in circumstances where that has not been a norm. They disagreed. They also mourned the loss of family businesses where generation after generation became carpenters or bricklayers. I’ve worked with lots of people in family businesses and it’s very definitely not been a choice that they had to go into it, and it has made them deeply unhappy. Choice is crucial for human happiness. My suggestion was most of us at some point need a mix of roles to fill in between jobs or around uni or kids. I’ve cleaned toilets and stacked supermarket shelves in my time, just as many of my clients who are business leaders have done too. I feel there’s enough people to go around.  I argued the point that neuroscience even proves that humans need choice and autonomy and when that didn’t work, we agreed to disagree.  This conversation led me on to something I’ve often wondered about. At what point does your company deem an employee worthy of investment? I work with senior C-suite business leaders and their teams but on my journey up to this I worked with people in much more junior positions.

Middle management seems to be where individual support was occasionally offered and only if really required, before that a workshop would do. I wonder when you last asked every member of your workforce what choices they feel they have? When was the last time you truly tried to help them achieve those dreams and desires? It’s a tough ask when you’re rushing around, but imagine that in those lower ranks is your next incredible innovator and maybe they don’t even know it. In these days of remote working, young talent is harder to spot and harder to catch in the moment. In the ‘old’ days, you might notice someone doing something really well and praise them, now unless it’s seen on your computer you probably won’t notice. 

This person’s really negative viewpoint (in my value system), made me truly reflect on choice. 

I’d really like to know your thoughts on their statement and what it has thrown up in the air for you?