How To Delegate Decision Making Without Descending Into Chaos
Imagine a word to describe your favourite sports team charging around on a field in orchestrated perfection. Coordinated? Efficient? Purposeful? Whatever you came up with, it probably wasn’t “anarchy”. But why is it that we can accept the best performing sports teams have highly autonomous players making split-second individual decisions all the time with minimal oversight, and at the same time think that applying the same principles to your employees will descend into chaos? Bad management, that’s why.
So how do you do it?
Overshare information
Everyone on a sports field has close to perfect information about the current state of play. As mentioned in this post on the right people for flat organisations, information is critical if you plan on delegating decision making to employees. So much so, that the best strategy is to overshare information. Steve Jobs had this to say about Apple: “Every Monday we review the whole business,” he said. “We look at every single product under development. I put out an agenda. Eighty percent is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week. We don’t have a lot of process at Apple, but that’s one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page.”Accountability
Broadly there are two aspects to accountability. The first is to ensure there’s always someone directly responsible for any project or decision. There is no ambiguity in what the goalkeeper on a football team is responsible for. Again, from Apple: “At Apple there is never any confusion as to who is responsible for what. Internal Applespeak even has a name for it, the ‘DRI,’ or directly responsible individual.” The second aspect is actually holding people accountable. When I was doing my MBA (one of my dirty secrets), I’d commonly hear people refer to wanting profit and loss responsibility. What this normally meant is they wanted the power, prestige, and pay of a senior role, but when push came to shove (e.g. they missed their targets) they’d be the first to try and dodge the bullet. If you live by the sword you have to die by the sword. What most people don’t realise is that the most effective accountability actually comes from peers. Research from Joseph Grenny (author of four NYT bestsellers) showed that broadly:- bad teams have no accountability
- mediocre teams have members who are held accountable by their manager
- high performing teams have members who hold each other accountable