It s the People

It's the People

It is essential to becoming an invincible executive that you learn to loosen the reins on your employees as you move up the management chain. During the early part of your career, you will be able to exert a fair amount of control over the people who work for you, if that is the way you prefer to manage. But you will become harried, frazzled, and resented if you try to micromanage greater numbers of people at higher levels in the organization.

It seems counterintuitive that as your responsibility increases, your willingness to give up control also has to increase. Invincible executives resolve this tension with three management tactics: (1) the ability to revert to micromanagement when a very specific problem arises, which we will cover in Rule 22; (2) developing excellent information flow, which we will cover in Rules 23 and 24; and (3) devoting a great deal of time to making sure that the right person is in the right job, which we will cover right now.

Invincible executives have the uncanny ability to pick the right person for the right job. In choosing the right person for a job, top professionals look not only at objective factors like competence, leadership, intelligence, and ethics, but also subjective factors like: Will this person work well with the person we currently have above him or her in the organization chart? Does this person have the personality type that will mesh with the particular clients or customers he or she is expected to deal with? Is the person well suited to the current and anticipated future projects of the organization?

Bill Shaw, president of Marriott International, notes that confident and competent managers do not micromanage because they do not want to make the organization totally dependent on them. "You need to let others develop the ability to run the show while you are gone," he says. For that reason, Shaw takes a very active role in "finding, developing, and retaining talent." Then he looks for opportunities and responsibilities to give away to his people—the antithesis of micromanagement.

From my interviews and research, I was surprised at how much time invincible executives spend choosing people rather than managing the organization. Recently, in connection with a legal matter, I had to review the e-mails sent between the CEOs of two companies that were in a joint venture on a major federal contract. The government customer was unhappy with the quality of the product. I would say that 90 percent of the e-mails between the two CEOs related to assessing the people who would be charged with fixing the quality problems, and only about 10 percent related to how the quality problems were actually going to be fixed. That is the way invincible executives avoid falling into the micromanagement trap—they focus on people who will resolve problems even more than the problems themselves.