You won’t always have the luxury of time to promote active commitment on your team. It’s typically something you want to start with low stakes decisions, quick decisions, or you’ll have to carve out a little time for it. This isn’t a skill that’s immediately unlocked because of a 5 minute conversation. This process will take weeks of coaching in 1:1s. Not because it’s hard, but because your ICs need time to exercise the muscle. Active commitment is more commonly developed once someone is already in a leadership position, but if you want to set up your team and your company for success, it’s never too early to start.

Step 1: Talk to your team

To start the process, you can announce it in a team/department meeting. Let ICs know that one of your priorities will be building the skill of active commitment with each of them. Over the next few weeks, you’ll be working on this in 1:1 meetings. Be sure to sell them on the benefits of active commitment for the company, for the team, and for their own professional development.

If you’ve already built a culture of psychological safety on your team, you can also encourage ICs to discuss this concept with each other to accelerate their learning.

Remind the team that you’ll start small, with some easy quick decisions, and eventually work up to larger strategic decisions. As you go through this process, be sure to reinforce when is and when is not an appropriate time to do the full active commitment process. In a situation where time is short, and snap decisions are critical, you can carve out time for discussions around active commitment in your 1:1s.

Step 2: The first conversation

When you ask an IC what they think is the right course of action, the first few times in 1:1s they might shrug and say they don’t know. That’s fine. You’ve at least primed the question in their mind. They know you’ll ask again. Take the pressure off, and come at it from another angle. Ask them what they need in order to come up with an answer. There should be an escalation process for this decision making. They can start with their individual tasks and maybe they will vote based on what enables their work the most. This is a perfectly reasonable place to start. Tell them that makes sense given the context they have.

Next, probe a little further. Ask them if the solution they chose unblocks or enables anyone else on the team. If they don’t know, set that as an action item for your next 1:1. The IC will need to listen to other team members updates and ask questions to understand the other person’s tasks. If most of the ICs on your team are close to the same step of the process at the same time, this might prompt some good discussion between team members.

Step 3: Subsequent conversations

In future 1:1s, continue to expand the scope of these conversations. Don’t just ask how an opinion or decision would impact your team or another team. You can also ask how their opinions would impact the company’s strategic objectives for the year. At the top level of these conversations, you can tie it all back to company values. As the IC continues to work on this decision making process, they will develop a better sense for what decisions best align with company goals and values.

Active commitment going forward

If you have a strong culture of psychological safety, and you’ve started to get the sense that the ICs are generally stating opinions that are aligned with company goals and values, you can start to bring these exercises out of your 1:1s and into group meetings. As you reach decision points in your meetings (time permitting) you can quickly ask a few attendees to volunteer their thoughts and explain how their recommendation also contributes to their teams’ tasks, other teams’ tasks, company strategic priorities, or company values.

Your responsibility as the manager

Congratulations, you’ve built a new habit on your team. As the manager, your responsibilities going forward are to make sure the habit is maintained and to coach your ICs on when is an appropriate time for a full active commitment conversation.

If you start to notice your ICs becoming less likely to volunteer an opinion, you can prompt for more input. In 1:1s, you can always ask your direct reports about their thoughts on a project or a recent decision.

The other things to remember is that active commitment takes time. In the moment, there may not always be time for a full discussion, but that doesn’t close the door on the topic. Remind your direct reports that they can always message you, bring it up in a 1:1, or even schedule some additional time with you for a conversation.