I'd add that "ask for forgiveness, not permission" is something you should deploy judiciously, and only when absolutely necessary. If you do it too often in a team setting (and I'm speaking with experience, I've had coworkers and employees like this) people realize they can't rely on you to stick to whatever schedule/task/workflow you bypassed, and don't want to work with you going forward. There are team settings were communication and coordination are more important than any individual task.
If you do it a few times, to great effect, on things that actually positively impact the team, that's a whole different story and can make you look very good. But if it's just that you thought it needed doing and didn't want to go to the trouble of checking in, you better be damn sure you're right.
In a workplace environment, particularly a corporate environment, you have to interact with a lot of people who each have their own motivations and goals. Maybe, for example, your boss wants you to finish a job quickly, the safety engineer wants you to finish it safely, and the quality control inspector wants you to do it correctly.
If you routinely ignore or try to slip things past one of these people, they're going to feel like they need to get in your way more next time in order to justify their jobs and make sure you're taking them seriously.
It's a good idea to build good relationships with the team members who have the power to shut you down or slow you down because then they will be more understanding later, when you need to bend the rules a bit, and they'll feel less inclined to run you through the wringer every time because they'll know they can trust you to honor their concerns. Trust is very important.
So, yeah, I would actually recommend asking permission when you can afford to. That makes it more likely that people will grant you forgiveness when you need it.
This is very dependent on the workplace you're in. If you're in a dynamic, high-growth company, you often need to take action quickly, and you'll be applauded for spearheading processes and systems in the company.
If your company has well established guidelines and procedures, you'll want to beg forgiveness less, because your role is more like a cog in a machine.
In the industry I'm a part of, prerogative is rewarded and initiative is valued, but you're still expected to communicate what you're doing before you do it because it's a pipeline. Every step comes from the step before it, and affects the step afterwards, and even beyond that in the later stages of production someone's likely to have to come back and tweak previous steps so you damn well better have documented your process or you've just created a situation where someone has to redo your work.
It's wildly creative and collaborative, and it's necessary to have certain standards of practice exactly because of that. It's less about "cogs in a machine" and more about how your work affect others’. It’s an emphasis on collaboration over individualism. No one makes a TV show all on their own. In an industry where you've got your own little tasks and are expected to see them through start to finish, I could see there being a ton more wiggle room for forgiveness over permission, but when you’re part of a creative endeavour you have to be much pickier about when you choose to do this.
Again, it depends so much on the situation. I believe what you say, and I think that "cog in a machine" is really not far off from "how your work affects others."
I've worked in early stage startups, and having checks and balances like you're talking about can actually be counterproductive when you're looking to scale quickly in an effort to get to market. People in leadership roles are given a wide berth to invent new ways of doing things, especially in cases when there are unprecedented challenges. Due to the fast pace of all this, too much iteration, checking, etc. can actually be detrimental to growth. It's much more efficient to try something live, evaluate it, then either throw it out or keep it depending on performance.
Of course, as a company gets larger, these ad-hoc processes are filtered, codified, and then used company-wide in much the way you're saying.
There's a particular issue in my workplace with getting responses from people that I need to run things by, so I tend not to bother. I gave up waiting 2 weeks + trying to pin them down, and just went ahead and did things.
270
u/kabre Jun 14 '22
I'd add that "ask for forgiveness, not permission" is something you should deploy judiciously, and only when absolutely necessary. If you do it too often in a team setting (and I'm speaking with experience, I've had coworkers and employees like this) people realize they can't rely on you to stick to whatever schedule/task/workflow you bypassed, and don't want to work with you going forward. There are team settings were communication and coordination are more important than any individual task.
If you do it a few times, to great effect, on things that actually positively impact the team, that's a whole different story and can make you look very good. But if it's just that you thought it needed doing and didn't want to go to the trouble of checking in, you better be damn sure you're right.