Here is an excerpt from an article written by Jac Fitz-enz for Talent Management magazine. He explains how and why lists have power to drive employees to action, whether it’s to solve a problem or make the workplace a little more fun. To read the complete article, check out all the resources, and sign up for a free subscription to the TM and/or Chief Learning Officer magazines published by MediaTec, please click here.

Image courtesy of Flickr/Chris Lott

* * *

A college professor once shared with me one of the greatest lessons he learned in 25 years of teaching.

“You can speak wisely and eloquently about a topic, describing how it works, hoping to show students the way, and they will sit and watch you without taking a note or writing anything down of the inspiring points you think you’re making.

But say something like ‘there are really 10 things you need to know about this’ and pens come out, notebooks are opened, heads tilt forward and hands are poised in anticipation of truth.”

We like things that come in numbers. Numbers provide clarity and certainty, a sense that all deliberations are done, the excess carved away and the essentials delivered in a tidy package.

In short, lists have power to drive action when words fall on deaf ears.

So it is within organizations. Think of how many times you’ve seen lists starting at the Fortune500: “The 100 Most Admired Companies,” “7 Habits of Effective People,” “The 5 Things Every Good Manager Does” and “The 6 Things No Manager Should Ever Do.”

There are two types of lists. There are those that come to us from outside, and those that we make up ourselves. The more powerful kind, of course, is the lists you come up with yourself.

Let’s take that lesson and apply it to how we manage other people.

Talent managers talk about engaging and involving people by hiring expensive consulting firms and providing other intellectual resources to help the effort. But I’ve learned over the decades that the best way to engage people is to personally involve them in the problem-solving or idea-generation process.

The same goes for lists. I used to ask my staff to come up with lists to solve problems. The first time I tried this in a new job, I received a rather moderate response. While there were some early growing pains to this management approach, in time it became a fruitful exercise.

This happened for two reasons: The first being that we solved problems faster; the second being that my staff felt a greater stake in the decision-making process, and therefore felt more engaged.

* * *

Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Dr. Jac Fitz-enz is founder and CEO of the Human Capital Source and Workforce Intelligence Institute. I highly recommend his latest book, Predictive Analytics for Human Resources. I also highly recommend Atul Gwande’s bestseller, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.