If you’re unsure how to characterize your organizational culture, consider its place on the Forgiveness-Permission Continuum.

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” In an enlightened culture, employees take this pearl of wisdom to heart.

Ideally, you want to create a culture where workers fearlessly take prudent risks and test innovative ideas. They may mess up. The costs of their blunders can sting. But after their well-intentioned mistakes, they beg forgiveness and you gladly give it.

In a less healthy culture, employees instinctively seek permission from higher-ups for everything. Bureaucracy suffocates independent thought. Even the simplest action follows the collecting of signed approvals. Without the proper paperwork, no one thinks and nothing gets done.

The line between Forgiveness and Permission largely shapes workplace culture. I’ve worked for organizations that bred innovation—and stifling bureaucracies where you needed to get a boss’s permission to sneeze.

Sure, most companies lie somewhere in the middle of the continuum. Let’s just hope that, in the words of Tom Peters, your employer favors “a bias for action.”

There’s time to forgive later.

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Tags: leadership