Tenet of Leadership #3: Enable your people
Keep decisions at the lowest possible level. When decisions are brought to you as a leader, ask if this is really a decision you should be making. Enabling your people will require reinforcement with your actions. Every day offers a chance to show your trust in their abilities. Turning down the opportunity to make a decision that others in your organization could and should make says volumes to them about your trust and your desire for their development.
This tenet goes hand in hand with the first two: Respect/trust people and manage by objective. The purpose is to get the best possible solution, crafted by those who probably know best and who are likely to have to implement the approach. In addition, enabling your people is essential to showing respect and trust, and facilitates managing by objective.
This tenet also works very well for personnel conflicts. Many workers would like to escalate issues immediately to the boss rather than engage in a frank conversation with a co-worker. Rather than allowing people to fire “missiles” at colleagues through the management chain, encourage co-workers to work out their issues directly, offering to moderate if necessary.
Years ago, I had moved into a new job in a position of some leadership authority. I was immediately faced with numerous managers asking me to make decisions that were (a) too detailed and (b) beyond my immediate ability to consider due to lack of knowledge. What I found was that my predecessor had trained some of these managers to act more as reporters, sending information up the chain and then implementing decisions, rather than acting as owners of the problem and using excellent and well-considered management judgment to proceed. These managers did not feel empowered to make decisions.
Just like any change in culture, changing this situation took some time and patience. Some of these managers made the transition to the new management style and my new expectations and some didn’t. Some left the company. But the eventual result was a powerful transformation that created many decision-making managers where before there had been just one.
It’s not enough to respect people and manage by objective. You need to enable your people to make the decisions necessary. Keep these decisions at the lowest possible level in the organization and you will get better decisions and have a more satisfied workforce.
wired commented:
Welcome to utopia! When last time someone saw a c-level caring about his company more than his/her pocket? engineering is disposable low life from their perspective, take an antennagate as an recent example. Being a middleman reporter-manager in this situation is the safest position, forget the rest...
Desert Rat commented:
My point is...that when the CEO is dealing with tactical issues, he is not thinking strategically. The higher you get in an organization, the more strategic you must think. If a CEO is dealing with tactical problems, he does not have the right people under him, and/or he has not empowered those people. Tactical decisions should be made at the lowest possible level. Strategic decisions should be made at the highest possible level and establish the path for the organization. And yes, I am talking about a very flat organization. Anything other than flat is a dinosaur these days...
Larry Pendergrass commented:
In response to both desert rat and demodave: Thanks for your comments. Yes demodave, I think you have captured the spirit of my posting very well (except perhaps about your comment concerning those that “will never let that happen”). I feel it is best to allow the decisions to be made as low in the management hierarchy as possible, and reserve the toughest decisions, those that must be escalated for significant reasons, for upper management. And this is for all of the reasons you point out.
As an aside, it is tough to resist grabbing at an open issue that seems to have an easy answer, and offer a solution rather than enabling our people. Perhaps this is because we all hope for an easy problem from time to time with which to wrestle, rather than those that have been so heavily filtered by the time they get to us… in some cases these are problems where the only real wrong decision is not to make one. Resisting these easier problems takes self-control and a continuous personal reminder of the value in creating the right environment by enabling others.
Desert rat, I think that you are also agreeing with this sentiment. And you add that the tough problem is getting the right people in those critical spots. Since we have traded comments in the past, I know you believe in “getting the right people on the bus” as I do, and putting them in the right chairs, then let them decide on the direction and the critical work for execution. Hiring the right people is essential.
But I would also like to point out that often companies spend more time on hiring and firing than in developing the people we have to become the decision makers we need. Enabling your people is not just a matter of giving responsibility. It’s also about giving the right tools, identifying skill gaps, and giving the environment to fill those gaps. Great companies also have processes for mentoring, feedback and performance management to develop people toward enablement.
Thanks again for your comments.
Larry Pendergrass
demodave commented:
Desert Rat, I am not sure I agree with your statement that "The first principle of executive management is to give responsibility and authority to your top people, to make decisions on their own."
I think I agree more with Larry's implied statement that is is better to let some of that decision making happen "lower on the food chain". Perhaps you are more optimistically referring to delegation in a relatively flat organization, and my challenge is misplaced.
One of the most important principles of Lean manufacturing (and Lean management in general) is to empower the direct laborers. If a CEO (or C-level of any kind) were to get involved in that level of operations, he or she would soon be Gulliver in Lilliput. And in a large company (my experience is Honeywell) there are many, many layers of separation between "rank and file engineers" such as myself, and the lowliest of the low C-levels. I would much rather see the E(ngineer) and S(upervisor) levels empowered to make changes with minimal involvement from the M(anager) and D(irector) levels.
Unfortunately, the A-(hole/ccountant) Levels will never let that happen.
desert rat commented:
The first principle of executive management is to give responsibility and authority to your top people, to make decisions on their own. When you are the CEO, and you can take yourself out of the picture, and the systems and people you have put in place work flawlessly without you, only then can you say that you have done your job as a top executive effectively. The trick, of course, is getting the right people in those top management spots under you....
