As I would like to be a great manager in a near future, I will start a series of writings about the lessons that I observed in real life. Each lesson will focus on one particular managing principle that I am happy with, and packed with a bunch of examples to make it more applicable.

This writing is lesson 1, which is about helping people make their own decisions, instead of deciding for them.

Why?

As a single person, there is only too much you can do alone. As soon as you have a group of people working with you, what you want is to enable them to be as autonomous as possible. Otherwise, you will soon become a bottleneck of the team as every large or small decision have to go through you, making the team not scalable. Also, this creates an overwhelming load on yourself since you have to make decisions on behalf of 5-10 people instead of just yourself.

At the end of the day, why spend tons of money hiring smart people just so that you can tell them what to do? You don't need smart people for that!

How?

The single principle is "assume people are smart, your job is to give them the system and knowledge for them to make the right decisions themselves"

Here are a number of stories and what a great manager (or in some cases, a great friend or family member) would do:

VISA Application

I once applied for a Spain tourist visa with a friend. On the day of our appointment, my application was taken in while my friends' was rejected because they used an old photograph of themselves.

If it was me a few years ago, I would definitely blame them for being careless and making poor decisions about not taking new pictures just to save a few bucks. Doing that would somehow boost my ego, showing that I am smart and they are dumb.

What I did instead was not blame them for anything (i.e. assuming people are smart). But try to first explain what happened and what we should do next time (i.e. providing knowledge and experience), then elaborate on some of the possible mitigation with them like a reminder to take a brand new photo for each visa (i.e. providing systems).

The crucial point here is for me to avoid forcing them to "take new photos" because that's me making decisions for them. Rather, give them enough information so that next time they could make a better decision themselves, which could be "take new photos", but any other new ideas that they could come up with.

Eating healthy

My mom always wanted to lose some weight because that's good for her general health, and also for curing her back and knee pain. I decided to give her a hand by asking her to join the diet that I am following called "calories deficit", basically eating fewer calories than you normally need to lose weight.

I built a cool website in which she can pick the food and get the total amount of calories back and wanted to "force" her to use it because that's the only way I could think of (again, making a decision for people, bad mistake).

Of course, she only used the website as a reference point, and calculate everything in her old notebook because she does not know how to use the system properly. Also, she did not weigh her food very strictly but mostly guessed about its heaviness, which is a bad thing.

To this point, I failed to be a great son who tries to influence his mom (or a manager trying to influence his members). I think what I want to do is provide a lot of explanation and training, in a way that she realized that using the system is better than writing things down the note, and weighing food using a scale is better than guessing. The crucial part is she has to decide to use those stuff herself, not me forcing her to do so.

Teach a kid by telling him what to do

One pattern that I usually see in Asian families is that parents decide what their kids do or who they marry. The kid will most of the time obey their parents' wish to make them happy, even though they know that choice is not best for them. The final result is the kid never grows to his full potential due to the limitation of his parents' decision. Or even worse, the kid will just do whatever they want anyway, without any planning or support from their parents.

What I prefer to see is parents that do not interfere with any decisions of their kids, but rather give them enough knowledge and backup plans in case they fall over. For example, the parents could show their kids the experience of all the different jobs in this society, different cultures, countries, and people, so that the kids really understand all the possibilities. When the kids are about to make their decisions, the parents can be there to provide advice, alternatives, or another perspective on the problem. And when the kid failed in the face, the parents can be their strong emotional and even financial support.

I believe being a great parent (or a great manager) is not about making decisions, but making sure that their kid (or the team member) reaches their full potential.