Just Do the Right Thing

The owner of a company I worked for always said to me, “Just do the right thing”.

He hired me to implement a Quality Management System in his company because he had watched my career from a distance and was comfortable I was the right person to get the job done. In my first few months, as I ran into the inevitable obstacles that happen when you are changing a culture, I would go to him and ask if I could make changes that I recognized needed to happen to move us forward. He would always say, “Just do the right thing”.

After the third or fourth time I asked the same question and got the same answer, I asked him if he wanted me to make the necessary changes I feel we need without asking. To my surprise he said yes. He said, “I hired you to do the right thing. If I knew how to do it myself I wouldn’t have needed to hire you would I?” He trusted me.

Delegation is a function of allowing someone you trust to have the responsibility and the authority to do something new or something that you have been doing up to this point. If you give them the responsibility, but do not give them the authority, people interacting with them will quickly learn to ignore that person and come to you for direction; not allowing you to move on to new opportunities.

I have come to realize that giving away authority is one of the hardest things for a manager to do. The reason typically boils down to trust. If you don’t trust that the employee is going to do things correctly you will never truly let go of that responsibility. The problem with hanging on to responsibilities is it stops opportunity for growth for both you and the employee.

So how do we build the trust necessary to let go? There is a very simple three-step process that I find very effective in any training circumstance. First, “I do and you watch”. When you think you understand, then the second phase is “you do and I watch”. When I am confident you have mastered the responsibility, then the third step is release; “you do and I go on to other responsibilities”.

Build the trust you have in your employee to just do the right thing. Don’t let go until your confidence tells you to move on. It works ever time.