Diminishers 🤐 believe that pressure increases performance - they demand people's best thinking but they don't get it. That's because they haven't created an environment where people feel safe enough to truly express themselves and their ideas. An unsafe environment yields only the safest ideas -- aka ideas that employees know the diminisher boss will approve. Diminishers 🤐 are much more likely to just take over and do the work themselves, while complaining that "nobody else knows what they're doing".
Multipliers 🌱 know that people are intelligent and will figure it out. They put people in positions to stretch themselves and their abilities, and in return they get back that person's full brain power. Multipliers 🌱 create a foundation of safety and comfort, where people are free to offer their boldest ideas -- not just the safe ideas to keep out of the wrath of tyrant. They create an environment of learning, which allows employees to take risks and quickly learn from them -- which leads to breakthrough ideas. Multipliers 🌱 still demand a lot of their team, and create high pressure/high productivity places. They just make it safe.
The core insight is that people's best thinking must be given not taken. A manager can insist on certain levels of productivity and output, but someone’s full effort is always given voluntarily. Liz and the team did exhaustive studies, and found that a Diminisher 🤐 only gets 50% of their human resources value, whereas a Multiplier 🌱 gets 110% -- aka more than they thought they could give.
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This resonates with me deeply, and feels like one of the secrets behind Funmentum. We create this type of environment, that allows teams to move quicker, with bolder thinking.
Devin McNulty
Co-Founder of Funmentum Labs
P.S. We've created multipliers at dozens of Fortune 500 companies. If you want help with your company, checkout our Funmentum Training.