Getting smart people into your company is hard enough. Turning them all into great collaborators and risk-takers is even harder. Even on the most high-performing teams, coworkers don’t just openly share feedback and challenge each others’ ideas all on their own–managers need to create a culture that encourages this. And that usually requires building your team’s collective emotional intelligence. Here are a few straightforward (and entirely low-tech ways) to get started.

Source - Read More at: www.fastcompany.com

We occasionally  see companies where  managers do not feel empowered to make hiring decisions  and it results in an incredibly frustrating interview process, for all involved. Inevitably that fear of making a decision and being wrong seems to be company wide. We see it because we are so intimately involved in their hiring process, and  inevitably when we experience this type of bottleneck at the decision making phase of the interview process, we also see or hear of  signs of it elsewhere within the organization. 

It always seems to go back to a culture of being penalized for taking risks, and failing. 

You run this risk anytime your team members make a gamble and fail, and then pay some sort of penalty as a result–or even just perceive themselves to.

There is tremendous wisdom in making a concerted effort to go in the opposite direction. Pick the very best managers you can, and then TRUST THEM to make the best decisions, with the information that they have, at the time.  

Heap praise and appreciation upon people who give their best effort. Anyone on your team who tries something new deserves acknowledgment, even if things don’t wind up going as well as expected.

The most successful people always seem to gain tremendous insights from their failures.