I am writing a series of blog posts on how important it is to define the truth for yourself and your organization.  Earlier I wrote the first reason: Define your truths, the items that are fundamental to you, so that you do not place being liked over the right thing to do. The second reason to define your truth: Defining what is true helps you focus on working on the right things.  Now the third reason, operating under a structure of truths brings freedom to you and your employees.

It is critical that you clearly define the truth up front.  If truth is not defined clearly, published, circulated, and socialized people may be operating with the best intentions but against your truth. But if you have clearly established the truth and you know people are working towards it then you can give them freedom to work. They don’t need to be micromanaged, they don’t need to have every action reviewed, because you know they’re operating within the truth  framework. The truth does set you free.

While your employees may not work exactly like you would work the fact that they’re working towards the same goals and the same truths should enable you to free them to work without you looking over their shoulder. For instance, say a truth of your organization is that the customer comes first, the customer experience is primary, and you have documented this truth, published, and trained people on this truth. Unless they are choosing to be ignore you, your employees will not be making decisions that go against the truth. You don’t need to worry about the freedom people have because they are operating within that context. They aren’t going to take action against it and if they do there will be appropriate ramifications.

But that is freedom, the fact that their work is informed by the knowledge that they put customer experience first means they can operate without as many explicit instructions. People value freedom because that is how they can do meaningful work that utilizes their potential.  The best work gets done in that freedom.  Instead of having an additional person, namely you, working to accomplish what you asked, you’re able to enable people to accomplish the work on their own. Oversight is adding nothing if it’s solely there to establish guard rails which could be established by just clearly defining your truth up front.
This idea scales to you to your team to your larger organization into your company. Have you gone through to find the truth in your organization? Not the best practices the actual fundamental truths, the themes that you cannot deviate from. If you have have you got through and documented them then go make it clear to everyone exactly what they are.