Another day and another book review.

What if you start telling a fundamentally different idea to your set of beliefs you developed over the years as a manager: “Everyone is smart, and I will let them figure out.” This is the basic premise of the book Multipliers.

This idea comes with a lot of implicit actions. If you believe they are smart, you start changing your behaviors towards your teams:

  1. You give them more room to think freely and speak up.
  2. You start asking them more challenging questions.
  3. You stretch them and expect their best work and best selves.
  4. You keep them accountable for their work.
  5. You don’t need to know everything, and you trust their judgments more.
  6. You expect them to figure out problems on their own, and you only support them but don’t fix their problems for them.
  7. You talk less and listen more.
  8. You don’t become available for them every time and can focus on long-term wins.
  9. Even if you know the answer, to train them, you don’t give it but expect them to figure it out. That way, they learn not just the answer but the path of figuring it out.
  10. You don’t tell them what to think but what to think about.

However, for all these to be advantageous to your company and teams, you need to hire the right people. There is no cure for working with the wrong people. But there is a cure for your underutilized best hires, and that is to give them more air to breathe, think, and innovate.

Like in everything, there will be exceptions to the actions above. However, they will stand strong for many cases.