Trust Your Team to Make the Call
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Trust Your Team to Make the Call
Tim Reed
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Introduction: The Mire of Mediocrity
Many companies in our industry are stuck in the mire of mediocrity because they can’t make the decisions needed to take advantage of what the market is offering them.
Business moves at the speed of decisions, and one of the major reasons so many companies stall is because too many decisions are rolling up to a single leader—or a select few—who are often:
- Unable to make decisions in time to take advantage of any given opportunity.
- Make the wrong decision due to lack of expertise in the area the decision requires.
- Push difficult decisions off due to the fatigue of all the other choices they have to make every day.
All these situations, for different reasons, have catastrophic implications for the company involved. Most certainly, the company loses out on whatever opportunity the decision afforded. But as this bottleneck around critical decisions continues, other consequences soon follow that are even worse.
What happens when team members see, through the actions of their supreme leaders, that they don’t have the power to make decisions that will improve the company? Those with ambition and drive to make things better get frustrated and leave, while those content to keep their seat warm and maintain the broken systems of the company stay.
What happens when team members see, through the actions of their supreme leaders, that they don’t have the power to make decisions that will improve the company?
When every decision rolls up to a lone, all-powerful genius, it proves that the role of everyone else in the company is to simply stand by until they’re told what to do.
At this moment, there are likely things that can be done in your company to vastly improve it—but your team hasn’t been given the power to enact them. And what’s the purpose of their employment if not to make things better? But many owners and managers have more fear about the wrong decision being made than they do about stifling the minds and squandering the abilities of the people they pay to (in theory) utilize those very minds and abilities.
So how do you solve this problem? You trust the people on your team to make the call. It’s as simple as that.
This isn’t done flippantly or irresponsibly. As the leader, you have to intentionally build an environment where people are empowered to make decisions and given the boundaries and tools to make the best decision possible every single time.
Here’s how you do it.
As the leader, you have to intentionally build an environment where people are empowered to make decisions and given the boundaries and tools to make the best decision possible every single time.
This article is brought to you by Ortal.
Step 1: Set Boundaries
To be clear, decisions shouldn’t be made by anyone at any time—that would be disastrous. They first need to be made within the domain of responsibility of the team member. For example, customer service representatives shouldn’t be making the call on the steps in the sales process that are used on the showroom floor. Regardless of any expertise these people have on this subject, it’s not within their domain of responsibility. Likewise, sales managers shouldn’t be making decisions on how the installers are paid—it’s simply not within their scope of responsibility.
And responsibility doesn’t only rest on the managers and supervisors. Everyone in the business is responsible for something and should be allowed to make decisions within that area of responsibility.
I once visited a retail store that was hosting a conference for our industry and the bathroom lock on the showroom floor was broken. Throughout the entire conference, people were continually walking in on other attendees who were using the restroom, which was shocking (to say the least). What was even more astonishing was that I noticed an employee from the company would always knock before going into the bathroom, which told me that he knew the lock had been broken for some time. But rather than go to the store and buy a new one, he was content to work in a showroom with a broken lock on the bathroom door. And the fact that no one else from the company fixed the lock throughout the conference (despite lots of uncomfortable introductions among the attendees) shows that they were content to maintain the status quo as well.
Several years ago, a sales manager I knew wanted to start scheduling in-home sales calls for his team online so customers could book them any time rather than having to call when the business was open. The problem was that he wasn’t allowed to make the call. He wrote an email to his manager and made a couple of phone calls—none of which were returned—and finally gave up, continuing along with the way things were.
Would it have been better for that company to allow customers to book in-home appointments with salespeople online? I don’t think there’s any question. And what’s the purpose of being a sales manager if you’re not allowed to make decisions about the strategies your sales team can use to make sales.
Reading the two examples above, it seems so obvious what should have happened. But think about it: Are there broken bathroom doors in your company? Are there managers in title only who aren’t allowed to improve the very things they’re supposed to manage?
These stories highlight an important principle of business: If we don’t actively build a culture that gives responsibility, our people will capitulate to complacency and apathy.
If we don’t actively build a culture that gives responsibility, our people will capitulate to complacency and apathy.
In addition, decisions should be made within the boundaries of the company’s core values.
Core values are a grid that empowers team members to make the call on a moment’s notice with full confidence that they’re doing what the company wants. I’ve seen time and again where core values are simply a corporate facade to mask ulterior motives or a gimmicky marketing tool to manipulate customers into buying—but effective core values are something else entirely.
In my company, we have a rule that no one can get in trouble for making a decision that’s within the team member’s domain of responsibility and in line with our core values. And, as small as our company is, it’s the only way we’ve been able to survive with the amount we’ve had to adapt over the last five years. Decisions come hard and fast, and if somebody doesn’t make them, things die on the vine.
Imagine if a company had the following core values:
- Think about the next person to touch your work.
- View situations from our customer’s perspective.
- Leave things better than you found them.
- Treat everyone with kindness and respect.
- Serve the community.
- Act honestly—especially in difficult situations.
- Follow the process or make it better.
Do you think the bathroom lock would have been fixed? Absolutely. Would the other company have started booking online sales calls? There’s no question.
When we set clear boundaries for team members to make decisions within the domain of their responsibilities and the company’s core values, it’s a supercharger. Time is saved, improvements are made, and people are empowered to do even more next time.
Step 2: Give Responsibility and Authority
There’s nothing worse than being given the responsibility for an outcome without the authority to impact it. But this happens all the time.
There’s nothing worse than being given the responsibility for an outcome without the authority to impact it.
I remember a time when the foot traffic in our showroom was down 90% year over year. That’s right: 90%. It was brutal. We were following up on every lead, but we were handicapped by the lack of interactions with customers. My metrics showed that our team was writing up estimates for the few customers who were coming into our showroom and being faithful to pursue the opportunity afterward, but we needed more door swings—plain and simple. I wanted to make a marketing push to drive more people into the showroom, but I didn’t have the authority to do it. On a near daily basis, I would have to defend the jobs of my salespeople to my boss while imploring that we craft a marketing plan for our showroom, but nothing happened.
If there’s one way to crush the spirit of your team, it’s to hold them accountable for an outcome that they have no authority to improve—and that’s exactly how I felt during that season.
I once met with the sales manager of a retail company who wasn’t allowed to schedule sales training for his own sales team. As the manager, he felt a burden for how a couple of the under-performing salespeople were doing, but there was little that could be done about it. But this doesn’t just exist for retailers. I’ve seen situations where the vice president of a manufacturer wasn’t allowed to make a $4,000 marketing expenditure without first going to the president for approval.
In each of these situations, the companies involved were led by good-hearted people who wanted to do the right thing. But, inadvertently, they had built a no-win scenario for the people who had been tasked with the responsibility of leadership.
In order to win, a company must give responsibility and authority in equal proportion.
In order to win, a company must give responsibility and authority in equal proportion.
The ancient Scriptures say that to whom much is given much is required, and this principle is true in business. And what’s required when someone is given both responsibility and authority? Stewardship.
When team members faithfully steward things they’ve been given responsibility and authority over, they grow. And, in being faithful with a little bit, they show that they can be given even more. So you give them more. And more. And more.
This is how we grow our people in wisdom and responsibility—by giving them the authority to manage what they’ve been given.
We have the choice to force our people to live in fear—powerless to affect the things on which they’re judged—or to transform our team into leaders who are faithful to grow the resources they’ve been given. If we want more people in our company to grow our resources, we must give them the responsibility and authority to do it.
Step 3: Evaluate Decisions and Adjust as Needed
As you entrust people in your company to make the call, you’re not always going to like the decisions they make, and that’s okay. If you want every decision to be made your way, then you better enjoy running on the treadmill—because you’ll never get off of it.
As you entrust people in your company to make the call, you’re not always going to like the decisions they make, and that’s okay.
But the beauty of decisions is that if you don’t like the one you made, you can always make another. To that end, as your people make decisions, they must be evaluated in retrospect and adjusted as needed.
In my last job as a sales manager, we had a system that allowed our salespeople to understand how much to sell our products for and the amount of flexibility that we had in the margin of every product if they needed to use an incentive to close the deal. Based on this, I told the team that I never wanted to hear a pricing question unless it fell outside of the bounds of our pricing system. During that time, it was incredible how sales worked themselves out without unnecessary input from me to approve quotes before they went out. That said, I did have conversations with my sales team about how and when they used the flexible margin available when reviewing their commission reports and our overall sales numbers. No one would ever get in trouble for making a decision to give all the extra margin away to a customer—I had created the system of pricing and given them total authority to operate within it as they saw fit—but we did have conversations about how they chose to administer discounts and in retrospect what the wisest decision would have been.
Over time, my team learned how and when to use margin in the process of closing a sale—and why it wasn’t always the best tool to use in any given situation.
You may or may not agree with my specific methods, but I’ve found that people grow most in wisdom through the experiential knowledge of making a decision and being held accountable to evaluate it afterward with a trusted leader. In some cases, the decisions made need to be adjusted, and that’s fine—we can evaluate them together and change course as needed. But I find, more often than not, that the decisions made (even where I would have made a different call) are perfectly reasonable and continue to move our company forward. In many ways, the fact that the decision is made differently than how I would have done it strengthens our company because it keeps us from the natural ruts that my personality can lock us into.
But what do you do when your team makes the wrong call? You evaluate it and adjust—it’s as simple as that. In my experience, team members who have to evaluate the choices they make and find a way to correct the mistake learn more than the team members whose manager steps in to save the day every time. I’ll never forget the time my boss told me, “Sometimes you have to let the job fail so everyone can look at it.” And, as much as that stings, there’s a lot of wisdom to be gained from understanding what he meant by that. We learn from falling, and, in many cases, we only mature into making the right decisions when we’ve been given the dignity to make the wrong ones.
After evaluating the decisions we’ve made—both good and bad—we can adjust course accordingly and move on. Just as pilots don’t have to achieve perfect calibration as soon as they get into the air, we don’t have to rely on one supreme leader to make the perfect decision every time. If we’re willing to make micro-adjustments in midair, we can rely on the community to chart the path to our final destination together.
Conclusion: Time-Tellers and Clock-Builders
Trusting your team to make the call doesn’t mean that decisions are hasty or rash—or even that they have to be made in the moment. Yes, companies move at the speed of decisions, but sometimes the best decision is to wait.
A business that actively sets clear boundaries on how decisions are made, that gives its team the responsibility and authority to make things better, and that helps its people evaluate their decisions in retrospect to learn for the future is a force to be reckoned with.
In the words of Jim Collins, we have the choice of being time-tellers or clock-builders. Time-tellers are the only ones in their companies with watches, so everyone has to go to them to ask what time it is. But clock-builders construct a clock in the center of their companies so everyone can see the time for themselves.
Many business owners and managers in our industry find themselves on the never-ending treadmill because they’ve made themselves the center of every decision. Being a time-teller like this is exhausting—not just for you, but for your team as well. No one worth having in a company enjoys going to the boss multiple times a day to check the time instead of wearing a watch.
And in the midst of our industrialized society, most people in our companies have been conditioned to keep their heads down—or face the consequences. So it’s up to us as leaders to entrust them with the responsibility, freedom, and confidence to make the call.
So it’s up to us as leaders to entrust them with the responsibility, freedom, and confidence to make the call.
A couple of years ago, one of my team members, Matt Bradley, called me with a problem. He needed to order water bottles for a client as a thank-you gift and didn’t know if they should be ordered in green or red. When he asked me what I thought he should do. I smiled and said, “These are exactly the kinds of calls I never want to get.” We both started laughing hysterically, and it’s been a running joke in our company ever since.
If you want to see your people mature into business leaders who grow your company for the long term, then put them in a position of authority and trust them to make the call.
Tim Reed
Tim Reed is the President of WhyFire, where he helps business leaders in the hearth industry take control of their companies by providing them with sales tools to save time and make money. He's also the host of The Fire Time Podcast, which is actively helping thousands of people grow themselves—and their companies.
