Up until quite recently, I believed in and used the open door policy. The open door policy appears to say to your team that you are there to help them at every step of the way. However, what the open door policy does is that it creates a dependency and to encourage mediocre work. The open door policy creates a belief among your team that you are open to solving their problems and that as the leader you would prefer that they bring any problems to you. The policy also created the belief that team members can be happy to hand in average or below average level work in the hope that you as leader will correct it yourself. Followed by this belief is the false belief that you as leader do no need your team members and the team members take the attitude that you as leader are capable of making everything good and that you will redo everything that you do. Where I ended up with this was that I ended up working 12 hour days, arriving at work early and staying late in order to do my own work uninterrupted and spending a very stressful day fixing what was not right.
However, I didn't find this out through any higher thinking - I discovered this phenomena quite by accident. I was away for one week. And I realised by the amount of emails that I received while I was away and also how little things had moved on when I arrived back, that my team were unable to move forward without me. They relied on me and that reliance was wearing me down.
STORM DOORS
Therefore, I set about being rather unavailable, even if I wasn't away on trips, I gave each of my team members the power to complete work and the responsibility to complete them. This was a little difficult, because some of them are a little less organised as I am. I had people from outside the group try to alarm me by prompting me to correct the work and suggesting that the problems with the work would reflect badly on me. That is correct, they do reflect badly on me for being an open door leader and not creating a sense of self reliance and responsibility. So, I gave each member of the team complete responsibility for what they were producing and presenting. This not only freed me up to do more of my own work, and to enjoy doing that work, but also it freed me up to enjoy more of the things that I love and to think more about the direction of the group.
So, in my mind, the open door policy is not needing to have the door open all of the time and to entirely available to team members. It is cultivating the expectation of success in the team through strategic separation and unattachedness. It is giving to team members the knowledge and power to make their own judgement calls and to strive to produce high quality work themselves.
The Open Door Policy Management Myth - Truths Revealed
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STORM DOORS
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