Robert Houghton saves
most of his deep thinking about key issues at
Redemtech Inc. for time spent
on an airplane.
“You’re disconnected from e-mail, you don’t have your cell
phone, you are sitting in a seat,
and you can’t go anywhere,”
Houghton says. “You can get an
awful lot of thinking done.”
Using plane time for strategizing allows the firm’s founder
and president to stay connected with his employees when
he’s at the office and not worry
about the interruptions in his
day that inevitably occur. It
also puts him in a better position to share with his 400
employees the responsibility
for making decisions at the
provider of technology change
management services.
Smart Business spoke to
Houghton about how to get
your employees ready to make
key decisions.
Q. How do you prioritize
tasks?
Maintain a list of key priorities for the business. I use that
to drive assignments that I
give my staff, pursuing those
things I’ve identified as important. For the strategy, the
important but not urgent, you
have to allocate time for it.
Give yourself space on your
calendar to attend to those
things. There will always be
important and urgent things to
deal with. That calendar will
expand to fill the available time.
Keep a list of key priorities
that is short enough to be something that we can accomplish
and strategic enough so that if
we are able to successfully
accomplish a particular objective, it has a very material
impact on the business.
It’s very dangerous to imagine
you know everything. The folks
working on the front lines are
going to have a whole lot of
ideas I wouldn’t come up with.
Q. How do you get the most
out of your people?
You can’t go in acting like
you know all the answers. If
you do that, you’re going to
foreclose collaboration. We
want to push decisions down
to the lowest possible
level where the expertise and information
exists to make a good
decision.
Encourage people to
have an opinion and
believe they have some
control over the job they
are doing and the results
the business is producing.
If all decisions are made
at a high level, naturally
people are going to wait
for the senior management level to make their
pronouncements and say,
‘Let’s hope they are right.’
If we didn’t get better
at decision-making, we’d
gradually grow less nimble and less intelligent
about the way we go about
serving our customers. As you
get bigger, you have to pull all
these additional brains into the
mix so the intelligence of the
business scales with the head
count.
