Through David St Lawrence, I’ve discovered Big Picture Small Office, which offers eloquent observations of life within the organization. If you’ve spent anytime within a company or a non-profit, you probably recognize Big Picture Guy’s characters, like Black Widow, Whiney Baby, and General Ledger. Stereotypes? Yeah, but isn’t it interesting that almost all organizations have folks who fill (at least try to fill) these character roles.

Today, BPG writes about a recent lunch with his Customer Care Center’s supervisor. What’s remarkable is that the lunch was not merely a simple chance to eat at a nice restaurant, but a teaching lesson on how the company could improve its service. BPG could have had a meeting with the CCC supervisor and preached how to improve (or even thrown his authority around and demanded it). Instead, he took the supervisor to an exclusive restaurant in order to facilitate a learning experience.

For any of us in leadership positions, it’s easy to take the most expedient route and tell people what they should do. How deep do you think the learning goes in this case? On the other hand, what happens when we offer our staff the chance to make the learning theirs; to actually help them take ownership over how new ideas and possible decisions integrate with their own previous experience? It might be one of the best gifts you can offer without all the preaching stuff.