[cookiecaper]

Great post. The snide remark toward michaelochurch might be the cause of your downvotes, but I upvoted you for the rest of it, because it is smart and right.

>X% of management is aligning incentives (X is some large number). Think about how to incentivize them to give the information you want, and how to remove disincentives. Money and responsibility / autonomy are the most basic incentives.

All of management is systemic. You can rarely change behavior by sitting down and tackling the problem head-on; people have an internal defense mechanism that interprets this as an attack and shuts everything down.

Any change one wants to make without triggering hostility/resentment has to occur as a side effect of gently and gradually manipulating the structure that the employee finds himself in, including the incentives and the environment.

Your example, which normalizes working on an internal processes and will make the employee feel like the odd one out if he doesn't have a suggestion for fixing the insides, is a pretty good one.