Less Work for Me
On Friday, someone on my team sent an urgent email asking for a meeting to discuss a decision we needed to make. I scanned the email for my name, a quick way to figure out how involved I needed to be. (I’m sure no one else does this.) Turns out, I was on the hook as the D (decision-maker) in the RAPID framework.
My first reaction was, “Geez. I guess I have to lock in.”
It’s not that I’m afraid of making decisions—in fact, I pride myself on being someone who can take responsibility. But I don’t like to make decisions. It’s too much work. If I can get others to decide, that’s ideal. Perhaps it’s the legacy of being the youngest kid in my family.
I’ve told my boss a few times that my goal is to be a lazy manager. That is, if I’m doing my job correctly, there shouldn’t be much for me to do. I subscribe to Reed Hastings’s view. At Netflix, he writes, “we pride ourselves on how few decisions senior management makes.”
When issues cross my desk, if I take the extra time to find the root causes and understand why they’re coming to me, they’re less likely to come back. Less work for me.
If I tell my team what I care about in a decision, their proposals are more likely to let me give a clear answer without much effort. Less work for me.
If my team understands which decisions are theirs to make, and I train them to make those decisions well, they won't need me. Less work for me, and good for their development.
Whenever I mention the lazy manager framing to my boss, she urges me not to say that to my team, because it hides the truth: getting there takes a lot of work. Time to work with the team on decision rights. Time to spell out how decisions get made. Time to understand the system and define what’s valuable. All the things that let a team operate well without close supervision.
Of course, I don’t work less than others. But being a lazy manager frees up time for learning, new ideas, and strategy, instead of being tied down by tactics.
Despite the language, the main reason the lazy manager framing resonates with me is that it’s the opposite of believing I should be in the mix, or that what I contribute is so important that everything should center on me. It’s not just more work; it’s worse for the team. When the boss makes every decision, they become the bottleneck, and things slow down. And when the boss takes on too much responsibility, others take less.
Which brings me back to that urgent email. First, I asked my teammate to propose criteria we’d use to make the decision. (Subtext: Can you do the work for me?) Then I suggested we should ask everyone else in the RAPID whether they agreed with the criteria. Unless someone disagreed, we might not need the meeting. (Subtext: Can we skip the meeting?)
Less work for me.