81.Avoid staying too distant.
You need to know your people extremely well, provide and receive regular feedback, and have quality discussions. Your job design needs to build in the time to do these things.
- 81A. Tool: Use daily updates as a tool for staying on top of what your people are doing and thinking. Daily updates are brief descriptions of what the person did that day, what they are planning to do the next day, their problems, their questions, and their observations. They typically take about five minutes to write and do wonders for staying in touch.
82.Learn confidence in your people—don’t presume it.
It takes time to learn about people and what confidences can be placed in them. Sometimes new people are offended we don’t yet have confidence in how they are handling their responsibilities. They think it’s a criticism of their abilities when, in fact, it’s a realistic recognition that we simply haven’t had enough time or direct experience with them to form a point of view. No manager (including myself) should delegate responsibilities to people we don’t yet know well enough to have confidence in. And new people shouldn’t be offended if we haven’t yet formed that confidence.
83.Vary your involvement based on your confidence.
Management largely consists of scanning and probing everything for which you are responsible to identify suspicious signs. Based on what you see, you should vary your degree of digging, doing more of it for people and areas that look more suspicious, and less of it where probing instills you with confidence. With the right tools in place and performing well, your scanning will include both reviewing the output of these tools (e.g., “issues log,” “metrics,” “daily updates,” and “checklists”) and spot-checking.
84.Avoid the “theoretical should.”
The theoretical should occurs when a manager theorizes that people should be able to do something when they can’t or without actually knowing whether they can do it.
85.Care about the people who work for you.
If you are not working with people you care about and respect, this whole thing ain’t worth it. If you don’t believe that, you probably shouldn’t work at Bridgewater. While it’s desirable to convey these feelings, having them is more important. It is good to share your lives together, but not required. Be there for weddings, births, and funerals. This is something that I try to do but fail to do enough because of the numbers, so I convey that I will be there for anyone who really needs me. Personal contact at the time of personal difficulty is a must.
86.Logic, reason, and common sense must trump everything else in decision-making.
87.While logic drives our decisions, feelings are very relevant.
A feeling is a reality—and a good reality—and it’s up to management to deal with all realities sensibly. Good emotions are important. In fact, they are probably most important since they are the reasons behind the good things we do, e.g., satisfaction with a job wonderfully done and love of others. Emotions are bad only if they cloud judgment and take us away from what we want.
88.Escalate when you can’t adequately handle your responsibilities, and make sure that the people who work for you do the same.
Escalating means saying that you don’t believe that you can successfully handle a situation and that you are passing the “responsible party” (RP) job to someone else. The person you are escalating to—the person to whom you report—can then decide whether to coach you through it, take control, have someone else handle it, or do something else. However, the boss should avoid being drawn into doing the job of the person who is failing without exploring why the job has not been done successfully without help. It’s very important to get an accurate assessment of what each person can and can’t do and why. If the boss just does the job for the person, even if it produces good results, we will lack the right attribution of success and failure. Remember that an important goal is to learn about what a person is like from testing, and that we want to get that information without crashing the car. So, the RP must either say that he can handle his job or that he cannot. And it is the responsibility of the boss to make the assessment of whether to remove the RP from the driver’s seat because he might crash. We learn from mistakes by seeing our failures, feeling the pain of them, and reflecting and gaining insight. If the boss and the RP don’t recognize the RP’s failures to fix things, and the RP lacks the ability to do the job, trouble will result. Remember that life is the best teacher—“the proof is in the pudding.” So going through this process is essential to real learning.
88A. Make sure your people know to be proactive. Demand that they speak up when they won’t meet agreed-upon deliverables or deadlines. This communication is essential to getting in synch on both a project level and on a personal level.
88B. Tool: An escalation button. Because there is confusion at times about whether responsible parties are conveying to their managers their problems or whether they are escalating, use an escalation button. This is a tool that makes clear to the manager that the managee is escalating.
89.Involve the person who is the point of the pyramid when encountering material cross-departmental or cross sub-departmental issues.
Imagine an organizational chart as a pyramid that consists of numerous pyramids, so:
When issues involve parties that are not in the same part of the pyramid, it is generally desirable to involve the person who is at the point of the pyramid. The individual at the point has the perspective and knowledge to weigh the trade-offs properly and make an informed decision. Not involving the person at the point of the pyramid will likely cause problems. In the diagram above, if persons G and H are having an issue, who is the point of the pyramid? If persons F and I are having an issue, who is the point of the pyramid?