Empower the leadership
Goldstein says a big part of getting your direct reports behind
you is letting them do their jobs without looking over their
shoulder — for the most part. He spends a good bit of his time
on the big-picture portion of the business, but he checks in
with all of his direct reports via a monthly meeting and a
biweekly progress report. The progress report, which is usually around 40 pages, is a bulleted breakdown from each of his
groups listing the overview of their project and its status.
“We cannot master every detail, but we can challenge our people
on some details at some times so that they really are forced to
explain what it is they’re doing and why,” he says. “And then you
can help people out because if somebody says something in their
area, you’re able to say, ‘OK, that’s interesting, you should talk to
so and so in this other area of the business because they’re dealing
with something that I think would be very relevant to what you’re
talking about.’ You can only do that if you’re pretty near the
ground.”
Using a system that shows where each group is works not just as
a measuring stick for you on each group’s success, but Goldstein
says it helps to raise flags on details you may otherwise miss.
“If I see a bullet point in those pages that I don’t have any idea
what they’re talking about, I’m going to ask because I really expect
to know,” he says. “I don’t expect to know about a financing
arrangement at the same level that the treasury people do, but if
I’ve never heard of the financing and don’t know why we’re doing
it, I’m going to ask somebody, and that holds true for any of the
hundreds upon hundreds of bullet points. And it’s not because I’m
trying to micromanage — I’m not inserting myself into the vast
majority of those situations — but I want to feel the pulse of the
business enough so if I see something that either I don’t know or it
doesn’t strike me as right, that it makes sense to the people when
I talk to them or I can correct a trajectory that will lead to an
unproductive use of time. If you’re not comfortable dealing with
detail, you can’t be at the top of this business, in my opinion.”
