Don't Cover Your Ass

Good to see you again!

I'm sure you have known people, who work hard to cover their asses. This is done so often and by so many that CYA has become a common acronym. There are managers, who put so much armor around their asses that they have trouble walking around and getting things done.

In corporate environments ass is one metaphoric piece of human anatomy that is best left uncovered to discourage defensiveness and build trust. Defensiveness and spinning are ginormous waste of time and insulting to customers, investors and other stakeholders alike.

I've another acronym. Leave open your ass (LOYA). How can you and I start practicing LOYA? Well, I'll share my tips with you, if you will share yours:

1. Listen attentively and take notes when someone criticizes you in a meeting. This is good stuff. Thank your colleague after the meeting and request him or her to continue to provide feedback in future.
2. When you feel regret for not covering your ass, openly accept your errors and move on.
3. Create transparency into what you are working on using frequent corporate communications, status updates, project management tools, task lists, design documents, marketing collateral, et cetera.
4. Stop e-mailing FYI to your boss as a CYA. You are just wasting his time.
5. If you are a senior executive, build an organization that is error-friendly and error-tolerant. Error-friendly organizations are more resilient. Such organizations allow people to quickly recognize, recover and learn from errors.

I believe LOYA is critical to building trust and initiative in a team. Now since I've written this blog, I'm going to try it first.

See you soon!