A sound policy instrument serves three purposes:
- Advancing the agenda of the leadership that approved it
- Surviving scrutiny from courts, auditors, and regulators
- Earning the engagement of the people it governs
Most organizations direct the bulk of their attention to the first two purposes. The third is routinely overlooked entirely. What attention it does receive is left to happenstance, inertia, and the personal preferences of whoever happens to be holding the pen.
Function #1: Advancing the Agenda
A policy instrument fulfills this purpose when it records the decisions of an approving body. It sets out the targets the organization is pursuing, the principles that govern how it operates, and the boundaries it will not cross.
Function #2: Surviving Scrutiny
A policy instrument passes scrutiny when it is not compromised, either jurisdictionally or linguistically.
Every policy instrument, by implication, asserts that the approving body has the authority to make the decisions it contains. It passes jurisdictional scrutiny when its approving body has a legitimate source of authority over the subject matter, its statements fall within the scope of that authority, and that scope does not overlap that of other policy instruments.
It passes linguistic scrutiny when each statement supports only one defensible interpretation. Ambiguous or grammatically unclear constructions risk a court applying the legal doctrine of contra proferentem, construing ambiguous language against the party that drafted it. In an employment context, that party is the organization.
Function #3: Earning Engagement
A policy instrument earns engagement by creating the conditions in which people are motivated to cooperate with, commit to, or actively champion the policies it contains. Those conditions exist when employees hear three things from the organization:
- that management knows they have good intentions and trusts them to do what is right
- that management acknowledges they are adults and respects their autonomy
- that the requirements being placed on them are founded on values they recognize and share
An instrument that sounds like it's demanding obedience conveys none of these things.
Instead, it generates resistance, widens the divide between management and employee, and systematically undermines the investment the organization has made in culture and leadership.
Govern by Design, Not by Default
A policy instrument is sound when all three purposes have been addressed:
- Policies that do not advance the agenda bring the organization zero benefit.
- Those that advance the agenda but cannot survive scrutiny risk not holding up when it matters most.
- Those that survive scrutiny but fail to earn engagement risk fighting an uphill battle for compliance.
Function #1 is where most organizations focus their time. The agenda gets clarified, recorded, and approved. It is the right starting point, but incomplete on its own.
Functions #2 and #3 consistently receive less, if any, deliberation. Jurisdictional authority is presumed rather than established. Linguistic precision is treated as a stylistic preference. And Function #3, earning the engagement of the people the instrument governs, is overlooked so routinely that organizations seem unaware of the damage accumulating in its absence.
The factors involved are interrelated. Success depends on deliberate decisions from among the available options, producing an enterprise-wide coordinated response that supplants siloed approaches driven by individual preference.
That response starts by building capacity inside the organization.
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