management, company-cultureHere’s a management issue I face regularly.
I am the CEO. I give a task to someone.
After little to none effort, they come back to me without having fully embraced and solved the issue.
For example (luckily not a real life example) :
Task :
Here is our budget, you need to find a hotel for this employee. It has to be on walking distance from this point.
After a couple of minutes :
Here is a list of all the hotels in the city in this budget. Which one do you prefer ? How long is walking distance ?
How do I push people to take more responsibilities ? How to define the barrier between an employee coming back for validation and someone who’s not embracing the task enough ? What part of our company’s culture should I work on to make people more willing to take responsibilities ?
So far I am not willing to fire anyone, just to be a better manager / have a better company culture.
You need to delegate authority in addition to delegating responsibility. They are not the same thing. I would suggest drawing up a JD with clearly marked out sections showing which authorities the employee has and which decisions they can make on their own and which part of the operations they are responsible for and any quality of service expectations. Then bring them in and run them through the JD giving specific examples, have them sign off. During the run through, you can specifically tell them that since they now have the authority to make these decisions they do not need to come to you validate it. But that if they require any assistance or a second opinion, you’d be glad to help. After that, do routine supervision to make sure the quality of the employee’s work meets your expectation.
In your example, add something like: “Please pick one you’d be happy staying at.”
In other words, make it more explicit that you’re delegating the responsibility to actually make the decision, and if necessary lay out a suitable criteria to make the decision.
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