Managing for success (Part 4) – Offloading unnecessary decision making

We regularly have students working with us as they do a placement as part of their degree. Specifically, UNSW and Macquarie University students studying for a Masters degree in industrial psychology are required to complete around 1,000 hours of placements over the two year full time.

I spent some time with one of them discussing how I run PTG Global. We talked about some of the things I do while running PTG. The first thing was about the nature of the people I employ.

When I started PTG (some 9 years ago), it was always clear to me that I needed to employ people who could compensate for the things I was not strong at. It’s often treated gliby when people say they employ people better than they are, or who can succeed them, but I don’t think people actually do it. It’s very threatening to employ people who are smarter and/or better than you are. And I imagine that managers are concerned that they might lose their job if there are people better than they are in the pool.

But the reality is that as a manager, you need to make yourself ‘dispensable’. That is, if you aren’t there for any reason, and all work stops, then it’s clear that you aren’t doing your job. Although i’m in the position where I own and operate PTG, it’s critical that I have people who can maintain things while I’m not there.

A client recently said to me after the week-long road trip we were on ‘I bet you’ll have a million things to do when you get back on monday’. I said to him ‘If I have a million things on, then I’m not a very good manager’.

It’s one of those things – we’d like to think we get great people around us, but a lot of people don’t do it. I’ve found it critical in my business to ensure people are empowered to make decisions.

How do you do this? It’s really quite simple and I do a couple of key things:

1. I let people make decisions
2. I provide some broad parameters for things in and out of their decision making authority (e.g. You make any performance management decisions and I’ll make salary decisions – truth is, I’ve even let that go now)
3. If people ask me things things that should decide on their own, I say something like ‘I don’t need to know about it – just do whatever you think is right’. If you do this a few times, people soon get the hint – but you must have the boundaries in place.
4. If people make a decision that’s not right, it nearly always can be fixed – so there’s no need to come down hard on people. As they say, ‘Shit happens’ – no-one dies, nothing bad happens in my line of work.

If you don’t offload as much as possible in the way of day-to-day decisions, your staff will wait until you get back to make the decision for them and nothing will get done. You will have become a road block in the business.

Keep focussed on managing and growing your business – you can’t do this if your always making day-to-day decisions for your staff.

1 Comment

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  By Ally, June 16, 2010 @ 1:03 pm

  Well said, Craig! I was just browsing the net and saw your post about this offloading issue. That’s just how my boss is! I don’t work directly with him (I am only a project executive) but my colleagues are always waiting for my boss who refuses to tell us all his schedules.

  You’re really a great boss

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