Learn to live with mistakes
Part of delegating decision-making is dealing with the mistakes that come along with it. If you want your lower-level managers to make decisions and take ownership, you have to let everyone know that you know mistakes will be made.
“The biggest thing I tell them is, ‘If you make the wrong decision about something, I’m not going to be overly upset about that. We can use that as a learning experience. However, if you make the wrong decision because you were careless or you didn’t gain the knowledge you needed, that upsets me,’” he says. “I’ll tell people that right upfront.”
When Young was 26, he was working for a food service company in Kansas City. The company was running the food service for the 1976 Republican National Convention, and he had the opportunity to put together a program for the convention.
It was a pretty substantial investment, but he received permission from his superiors for the project.
At the time, Young thought it was a great idea, but after the first day of the four-day convention, the programs weren’t selling like he thought they would.
“After one day, you get this pit in your stomach that you think, ‘Maybe tomorrow will be better, and I know it’s not going to be,’” he says.
“So, it turned out it was a bad decision. I’ll never forget this because I did think this was a bad enough decision that this could cost me my job.”
It didn’t cost him his job, but his boss did have a talk with him about it.
“We’re talking, and he says, ‘You know Ken, we could have sent you to Harvard Business School for what you lost on this,’” Young recalls.
“It relieved me because he was able to joke a little bit about it, but at the same time, we saw what the seriousness of that situation was.”
That situation hit home with Young because it said something about leadership and dealing with somebody who made a bad decision.
“If somebody has weighed something similar to how I would weigh making a decision and it just isn’t the right decision, I think you have to support the person usually in that case,” he says.
If someone makes a mistake that cost the organization $20 million, Young will have to hold himself accountable for allowing someone to make that decision. You have to avoid putting a manager in the position where he or she is left on an island when making a decision with big financial consequences.
“There’s obviously a point, especially with financial decisions, there’s a point where I am either going to buy in or make the final decision,” he says. “When you look at something that can do great harm to a company if it’s the wrong decision, I’m going to at least approve that decision.
“You come down to at what point is the risk that you are not going to permit somebody to make the final decision without coming to you. That just depends on the circumstance.”
If a wrong decision is made, then you need to sit down with the involved parties and talk about why the decision didn’t work.
“Because you have some great employees that just aren’t always going to make the right decision, just as I’m not always going to make the right decision,” he says. “When I make a bad decision, I just tell my own people, ‘I blew this decision. It wasn’t a good one. Here are the reasons I made it, but XYZ didn’t pan out so it turned out to be a poor decision.’”