“That’s how we’ve always done it!” (A guide to using PTR)

Last updated: October 12, 2021
Estimated reading time: 4 min

If you’ve ever made a decision—from how you communicate important announcements to staff to what you ate for breakfast—you’ve used PTR.*

PTR, which stands for preferences, traditions, and requirements, is a tool that can help you focus on what really matters so that you can mitigate bias and get to better outcomes. From an equity and inclusion standpoint, PTR is an invitation to pause, consider new perspectives, and be more explicit about organizational norms, culture, or expectations. Using PTR can help you mitigate bias in hiring, communicate more effectively when delegating, and stay open to new approaches.

Let’s say you’re a senior leader for a school or nonprofit. For as long as you’ve been there, all managers and project leaders have been asked to produce polished, written progress reports weekly. As you’re onboarding a new manager, here are some things you might communicate:

我们很容易从我们的传统或偏好开始，这些通常与我们的个人价值观和经历有关。习惯是很难改掉的，有时我们使用这种方法是有原因的。However, we recommend that project leaders and managersstart from the bottom: get clear on the R, and then consider the preferences and traditions that might help or hurt your path toward results.

By isolating the three components, you can manage with an eye toward the requirements, seek other perspectives, and be explicit when there’s a reason for requesting a particular approach.

Separating your PTRs takes practice. Here are some considerations as you get started.

1. Articulate the requirements or outcomes

Be specific about the goal you’re trying to achieve to build the team’s sense of ownership over getting great results. In the example above, you could start by looking at your organizational values—let’s say they include transparency and collaboration. With these values in mind, you clarify that the requirement is really for everyone to have timely access to the information they need to feel more connected, make decisions in their realm, and spot opportunities to collaborate. Writing is a preference and weekly emails are a tradition.

通过区分需求，您可能会发现您想要探索通向相同结果的新途径，例如带文本的视频更新，这可能更有吸引力和更容易获得。

2. Be flexible and seek other perspectives

Seek other perspectives as you separate your R’s from your P’s and T’s. Sometimes, you’ll need to let go of your preferences or work with staff to revise traditions (however beloved) as your team grows in size and/or diversity. This is an importantchoice point. When we rely on preferences and traditions as a shortcut to outcomes, we risk short-circuiting our team’s ingenuity and missing new approaches that come from diverse experiences.

3. Watch out for sneaky P’s and T’s

We all tend to conflate our preferences and traditions with requirements. Some P’s and T’s have been around so long that they sneakily become auto-pilot requirements. This can impact the success, participation, and belonging of your team members who have different needs, experiences, or ideas. It can also obscure your goal. If you find yourself dictatinghowyou’d like something done instead of the result you’re aiming for, pause and ask yourself if the “how” is really a requirement.

Above all, never let P’s and T’s become default expectations that only you’re aware of. When this happens, staff who are more like you (or know you better) are more likely to pick up on those expectations. Conversely, staff who are less like you may not be able to read your mind.

4. Be explicit about preferences and traditions—and why they exist

There’s nothing inherently wrong with preferences or traditions—as long as you acknowledge them openly and distinguish them from requirements. When you’re suggesting an approach to meet a goal, name it as a preference or tradition, share the “why” alongside the “how,” and indicate how open you are to other ideas.

• 当您对一个偏好或传统有强烈的感觉时，您可能会说:“对于这个项目，我更希望我们使用我们现有的软件，考虑到紧张的时间和预算。Adopting new technology will take time we don’t have, but I’m happy to consider ideas for next time.”
• When your preference or tradition is a suggestion, but you’re open to other ideas, you might say: “We’ve been doing X because we’ve had good outcomes with X in the past, but I’m open to other ideas. What’s your experience been? Do you have another approach you think will get even better results?”

When a particularapproach(mindset, behaviors, or values) is essential to getting results, you should be explicit about why, while inviting new ideas and being clear how (or how quickly) you’ll take them into consideration.

Now, check outsome additional examples of PTR in action.

*Credit where credit is due: we got hooked on the idea of PTR because of thisFortune article.

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