Delegate authority

Jeff Morris
president and CEO, ALON USA Energy Inc.

Jeff Morris, president and CEO of
ALON USA Energy Inc., says a CEO’s
job is to allocate resources.

“You have a certain amount of
resources,” he says in the March
issue. “You have a certain amount of
people. You have a certain amount of
money. You have a certain amount of
time. What you have to choose and
prioritize is how to use those
resources. You always have more to
do than you have resources to do
them.”

Great CEOs know how to delegate
resources, especially people, and
empower their staff to make decisions. They trust their staff but keep
an open door to offer assistance if
need be. He says there are two keys
to getting a high level of performance from a team. The first is hiring
great people. The second is trusting
them.

“You have to say, ‘Go do the payroll
system,’ and you can’t be asking
every hour on the hour, ‘How are
you doing?’” Morris says. “It’s not a
management-by-objectives system.
It’s not something where you set
objectives, and you have weekly
staff meetings to see how people are
doing, and you update and have
interventions to make sure you stay
on course. We didn’t have time for
weekly staff meetings. We are a
group of doers. We hire doers; we
don’t hire watchers. I don’t have anybody around here whose job is to
make sure that something happens
or that XYZ person is doing their job
or following up.

“We have doers. If you are the HR
person, you do the HR. If you are the
IT person, you do the IT. If you are
the top mechanic, you fix the pumps,
and we aren’t going to have someone
stand over your shoulder and make
sure you do it appropriately. That’s
really helped our cost structure, but
it’s also created a culture of doers.
You can trust them if they perform,
and they do.”