Super bosses Aren’t Afraid to Delegate Their Biggest Decisions For General Managers

Super bosses are expert delegators, ceding degrees of authority and control that would send chills down the spines of ordinary bosses. Innate and unshakable self-confidence certainly played a major role. 

Super bosses live to learn and invent. They’re die-hard opponents of the status quo. Example: As super boss Lorne Michaels told me: “The show must change. I know it’s supposed to be ‘must go on,’ but ‘must change’ is important also.” Super bosses are constantly pushing themselves to innovate, and they expect employees to work independently and take bold creative risks

But what if protégés failed in their experiments? They are willing to admit their failures and mistakes, which puts people around them very much at ease.” If you accept that you will fail from time to time, and that your employees will fail too, it’s far easier to relinquish decision-making responsibility — and still sleep at night.

Super bosses really know their employees. They’re what we might call “hands on delegators.”  Regular contact with employees puts super bosses in a perfect position to “trust and verify,” as the old motto goes. They can monitor decision-making and enforce accountability on a real-time basis because they’re there.

Super bosses know protégés’ first-hand. They understand their strengths and weaknesses. They’re aware of how much progress their people have made and what responsibility they’re ready to shoulder, and they’ve taken the time to craft customized development plans for them. In the hands of super bosses, the old motto becomes: “Observe, coach, and trust. And then verify.”

Super bosses place clear boundaries around delegation and decision-making During the execution of work tasks, employees enjoy extraordinary authority over everything except the vision. Every manager should craft a compelling vision for their teams, no matter where they are in the corporate hierarchy. And super bosses generally stay clear, intervening only to ensure that decisions employees make support their visions and don’t conflict with them.

Follow super bosses in creating the preconditions for trust If you lay the groundwork, delegating decisions ceases to be nerve-wracking. It becomes what it should be: natural, exciting, and value-creating for boss and employees alike.

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