Category: Business, Organization, and Management

I invest in my staff – a lot. When it doesn’t pay off I move on. When it does pay off I’m always absolutely thrilled. The best way to invest in your staff is to negotiate decisions with them, until their decisions are as good or better than yours. You must never lose control in the sense that decisions are ‘deals’ between you and your staff. The deals must persist. But at some point they begin to understand the overall deal structure (they have adopted your goals) and you are really able to rely on them for stopping you from making mistakes rather than you stopping them from making mistakes.

So, the best approach is to constantly consider how to spend your time. It is much more time consuming to negotiate (train) your staff so that they make good decisions, but it is a much larger long term payoff to try to train everyone to make good decisions. When they do, they have sovereignty, and are in control of their lives and we all desire that. They feel respected, and are respected, because they participate. I dont do this for purely warm and fuzzy reasons – even though the sociology of the work place is something very important to me. I do it because I am, at all times, trying to invest now, so that I can tackle other problems later without the fear of absorbing risk by doing so.

My staff has hit a sort of critical mass since the spring, but particularly since we sent them to work together in a villa for the spring and summer. When you are that close to people, all sorts of external influence and posturing eventually disappears from the daily work and a level of trust develops that is something beautiful to behold.

Managers can really be separated into those who do such things and those who either don’t or can’t, because they aren’t craftsmen. This is one of the things I’ve learned from the ‘good to great’ research: that you really must build people from within, and from craftsmen, mature them into managers.

Otherwise nobody respects those managers, and they are right not to. They’re just bureaucrats. And no trust can develop in that environment. And thats why it doesn’t.