Red Light v. Green Light Policies
In his new book The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores why rates of mental health issues have increased for youth today. He traces the problem to the rise of social media, mobile devices, and intensive parenting approaches that curtail kids’ ability to explore, take risks, and develop resiliency.
Reading The Anxious Generation and a couple of other parent books around the same time spurred me to consider how to give my kids more opportunities to be responsible. The first place I started was allowing them to walk to school independently.
Now, this isn’t a huge or risky endeavor—our school is just half a block away, and I can watch them walk into the front door from the sidewalk in front of our house. My only worry was that my five-year-old son hadn’t yet shown he could reliably look both ways before crossing the street between our home and the school.
The first day they were going to walk alone, I reminded them, “You have to be responsible for your safety crossing the street.” That was partly to make myself feel better about taking the risk and partly because I figured Big Time couldn’t forget the lesson in the 20 seconds it takes to walk to the corner. They both got it that first day and have been great every day since then. While I worried about Big Time being responsible, it turned out that he just needed an opportunity to rise to the occasion. Indeed, I suspect the lack of reliability was due to always having someone else hold the responsibility for him.
My life is made easier because they can take on this task. If I’m watching TV in the morning, I can wait until a commercial break to send them off and be back on the couch before the show is back on. Of course, my hidden agenda in all this is to save myself from having to monitor their walk once the cold of winter arrives.
The experience reminded me of a story from Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’s book Move Fast and Fix Things. They describe how the hotel chain Ritz-Carlton empowers employees to spend up to $2,000 resolving guests’ problems without manager approval. When they introduced the policy, many hotel franchise owners were worried about the expense and whether employees would use their new power irresponsibly. According to company founder Horst Shulze, however, most incidents are resolved with gestures as simple as “a plate of cookies or a lunch.”
What’s striking about that example is that the policy could be interpreted as a constraint on action—“Do not spend more than $2,000 on customer issues.”—or an enabler of action—“As long as it’s under $2,000, do whatever you think is reasonable to serve customers well.” Both may technically empower employees, but one formulation likely discourages action whereas the other formulation encourages it. A red light policy versus a green light policy.
The former framing signals distrust to employees; the latter signals a belief in their ability to make responsible decisions. Perhaps even more importantly, it is hard to communicate the enabling version of the policy without describing what a responsible, strategy-aligned decision looks like. In that sense, it helps employees make good decisions and become better decision-makers.
That’s why, when giving my kids the power to walk to school, my message wasn’t “Here are the precise actions you need to take to keep this task.” Instead, it was, “I believe in your ability to make good decisions.” Of course, I still monitored the initial decisions closely to mitigate the risk, but the payoff will surely come in January when I’ll be able to remain comfortably in my toasty house each morning, confident in their ability to succeed without my oversight.