The military rank of naval Captain carries heavy
responsibilities since they are the last authority aboard a warship. A lot of their authority is a carry-over from the days of sailing ships when the ship
the Captain commanded was the fastest means of communications in the world.
This meant that the Captain was often dealing with foreign
governments without the ability to ask his own government for instructions. He
had to be trusted to make decisions on his own. This in the days when his poor
judgment could catapult his nation into war!
Communications has changed so much that a Captain now has almost
instantaneous communications with his higher command and can check for instructions
in real-time. The problem arises when the higher command, relying on a summary,
isn’t looking at all the key factors that might be obvious to the Captain on
the spot. The following Dilbert cartoon is a prime example.
Have we reached a time when communications are so simple and
quick that too many of us are not doing the fundamental research and background
reading that good decision making demands? Because we can quickly and easily
contact subordinates, we have pulled back their scope of decision-making and
restricted their ability to innovate and respond to changing conditions?
Remember that what looks like a bad decision to the person
who only reads the summary might be a wise decision to someone else who has
access to all the facts and is taking into account the subtleties that a
summary is DESIGNED to eliminate.
I remember doing a briefing for a senior manager shortly
after I had been promoted from operations to my first “staff” job at the
corporate headquarters. The person I was briefing didn’t seem to get my point
so I used a whiteboard to illustrate the fact that we were spending a serious
amount of time and money maintaining obsolete first and second generation equipment. All the
other equipment had either been upgraded or replaced with third generation equipment.
Since all the equipment was customer owned, he asked how that
had happened and the answer was quite simply that some equipment had been
missed during the upgrades but the contract demanded that we maintain the
equipment in its existing generation.
As the conversation progressed, he asked, “why didn’t I know
this” and I referred him to the memos I had been filing with my reports asking
for guidance on the problem. His reply was illuminating: “I didn’t understand
the impact of what you were saying.” He didn’t understand because he was too
far from the action. In effect, he could only see the forest but he needed to
look at the trees.
He was reading the executive summary and not diving into the
supporting details as it was too much information for him. His attitude was summed up by a
comment he made earlier in the briefing: “I asked you what time it is and you
tell me how to make a watch!”
He did need those details to make an informed decision but
his impatience with that level of detail lead him to ignore the supporting
information. He also decided that he didn’t need to take the advice of the
person on the spot to invest in upgrading the few pieces of equipment to save
even more money on the cost of maintenance.
Using the naval Captain analogy, the person closest to the
action (in this case me) had the best knowledge of the situation and the best
solution.
Senior management’s job is to balance the immediate needs against the long-term needs, but (and this is a critical "but") without meeting the
immediate need you may not survive to get to that long-term need.
If higher command is only focused on one aspect of the
business (e.g. short-term share price) they are likely to avoid spending money on
long-term elements that the person on the spot will recognize as important to the long-term survival of the business.
As we move from promoting operations people to senior
management and more and more into hiring managers with deeper academic training
and less industry or company experience, then the subtleties can get lost.
Can those non-operations people be effective managers? Of
course, but just as the Pointy-Haired Boss in the Dilbert cartoon doesn’t have the knowledge
to judge what he needs to know, the key is to trust your subject matter expert. (In this cartoon it was Dilbert.)
When that naval Captain in the age of sailing ships made that
decision, he had confidence that his higher headquarters would back him up!
