Larry Weidel outlines how management systems evolve as organizations grow: start rigid with rules, move to guidelines that allow 10-20% flexibility, then shift to guiding philosophies that trust managers to act on values. More exceptions emerge at scale, so rules stop working.
I was thinking about genius leadership basics and came up with a couple of things I think you're going to want to have in your arsenal. So I'll just add this in real quick because these can either propel you forward or they can hold you back. The rgp and what are they? First of all, you're going to go over here and start with rules. Then you move into guidelines. That's another thing that you're going to use from time to time and running your organization, maintaining order. And then you're going to have philosophies. What you find is when you get started, when you first get started, organizations pretty much run off of rules. They allow you to maintain order. Most of your people are not that trained. You don't want to have a lot of debate about stuff. They want to know a black and white answer since they don't have the experience, so they don't have the judgment. They like to know exactly what it is. They like the idea of not having to think, just tell me what to do. I want to spend my time doing, not thinking and evaluating. And the advantage of that is even the most mediocre managers can run these kind of plays because not a lot of thought, not a lot of variation. All you have to do is be able to look at the manual, follow the rules, teach the rules, run it. After you get going, you start having some success. You find the rule game plan starts to fall apart. And this is why I did this video, just so you could have this little concept in your head. And that is the bigger you get, the more exceptions you're going to get. In other words, the more special cases, when you're small, you just have a few things going on. It's really easy to come up with a bunch of rules that handle your situation. But as you get bigger, you get more special cases, you get more variety. Actually, it's good because you get more opportunities. You get things that may not fit into your little mold but also give you potential for much bigger rewards. So then what you find is the advanced, more advanced organizations move over to guidelines and what happens is the guidelines tell you what to do 80 to 90% of the time. In other words, you still have your structure, but they're not rules because they're guidelines. Now you have 10 to 20% of flexibility. You're allowed to make some exceptions, some special calls for special cases, without setting your organization into a big riot of rebellion of how dare you make an exception for Bobby Joe when I had to do this, that and the other it allows you to be a leader. It allows you to call a shot, to give somebody a break when they deserve a break, to try something new. If your rules are great, but they're rigid, and you might need that rigidity when you're started, but as you get more mature and more advanced, more things happening, and also the bigger you get, the faster things happen. You need some freedom. It's basically you're giving yourself some leadership freedom. Now at this point, you've got even more experience, but you've got leaders underneath you that have a feel and you know you're more able to handle a little bit more flexibility in your system. But now, as you move, you get bigger and bigger and bigger. You're going to find more decisions, more things happen because of the company philosophy that you've laid down. And you'll have things like this. We believe. You're not saying it's a rule that such and so, but we believe the better you prepare, the more you do, the better your odds of winning. So when they're trying to cut corners and get by with things, say, well, you can do that. That's one philosophy. Our philosophy is rather than do the minimum, do the maximums overdue. By doing that, you get the most experience, you develop your skill set. So when you go out on your own, you're in a strange situation, you've more odds of winning. Winning is never guaranteed, and this maximizes your odds of winning. The other thing, we have a philosophy of training for the top. See, we believe you cannot. And again, backflow. We believe you can't pick a winner. We believe there's no way of looking inside someone and seeing if they've got what it takes to go all the way to the top. And so our philosophy is, we're going to train everybody, give everybody a chance to go for the top. And you do things like, we have a philosophy. We give maximum freedom to our managers. We don't really check them that much because we operate off the honor system, because we have a philosophy that there's no such thing as a secret. And we know dumbbells think that you can cut corners and you can cheat, lie, cheat and steal and get away with it. But mature people, wise people, people that you build off, you can trust them to operate off the philosophy as there's no such thing as a secret. So those are just some examples of running your business off of philosophies, guidelines, and not just with rules. You find that genius leaders are able to use philosophy and guidelines and not be so totally dependent on the rigidity of a rule structure, which is good for launching, good for brand new people. But as you get into bigger levels, you want more flexibility. And the great thing about running off philosophies is also the chance that you give your training managers, your downline managers, more latitude to make decisions on their own. And they're doing that under your supervision. So even if they make a mistake, you could help correct it. But that's helping them to become more and more independent, because they get a chance to exercise their own judgment. Because your system has allowed that. Because you're not so afraid that you run everything off a rule. That's genius. Leadership number three Rules, guidelines, philosophies. We'll be looking for your comments. Maybe you've had some experience in this arena. 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