Asking for forgiveness

Grant Leboff: So Thomas, one of the things you talk about in the book, which is a phrase that’s always resonated with me, is that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, essentially. In what context are you using that in terms of marketing and teams?

Thomas Barta: If you’re on a marketing team, you’ve got to have a group of people that you trust enough that they can do their own things without you checking in all the time and I think that’s behind the idea of not asking for permission but asking for forgiveness. So trying something else, screwing up and saying I’m sorry.

Now there was a time when this was perhaps less important. Today, it’s crucial and the reason is, this is a really fast world, everybody on the marketing team can speak to customers be it through social media or somewhere else, things happen really fast. Crisis come, crisis … you can’t be there all the time, you have to rely on your team to be able to respond without calling you first and saying, “Can I do this or that?”

The key to this … and a lot of people ask me yeah, that sounds great, but how do I do this? Then when I talk to them and we see how they managing their team, what I often see is they spend say 10% of your time explaining what the team actually tries to do and 90% of the time figuring out if people do it right. If you want a team that can really act independently that has trust and confidence, you got to change this around, you’ve got to spend 90% of your time explaining what’s important, aligning everybody on what really matters and then 10% of your time perhaps checking and having some checks and balances in place.

It’s a fundamentally different way of leading, but once you get a team that is asking for forgiveness, and not for permission, you will have a team that bears more, that innovates more, and that ultimately helps the company to grow more.

Grant Leboff: In principle it sounds right, but if you’re a marketing leader, ultimately it’s your head on the chopping board when things don’t work out. How do you create a mindset for yourself as much as anything else in terms of being able to let go and allow, empowering your team, allow them to get on with things because ultimately as the leader you are responsible, right? So where’s that balance?

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.