Less than a week ago, a 21-year-old woman died after falling 130 feet headfirst when the bungee jump instructors failed to attach the safety cord to her harness before launching her off the railway bridge they were standing on. News feeds have been flooded with images of these 3 stooges holding her above their heads and pitching the woman to her death. It’s sickening.
After hearing this story, I couldn’t help but think about a mantra that I’ve lived by for years: Trust but VERIFY.
There’s an endless demand for ideas, programs, systems and tools for avoiding work – specifically the tiresome job of managing details. The 4-hour workweek. The “don’t sweat the small stuff” movement. The one-minute manager. The self-managing business. The promise is all the same: Put your business on autopilot so you can work as little as possible and leave all the hard details up to someone else.
I’m completely NOT in agreement with all this “on not in” nonsense being told to business owners.
ALL of the people pushing these concepts are salespeople without morals, jumping up and down on your exhausted greed gland promising you something that you KNOW is not true or even possible, but desperately want it to be – and your desperation of not wanting to sweat the small stuff and abdicate responsibility makes you Charlie Brown, flat on your back, wind knocked out of you because once again, Lucy got you to believe that THIS time will be different. Pfui.
I get it. Eliminating the need to dig into and actually manage all the gory minutiae of running a business is a very seductive idea. That’s why it’s a perennial best-seller among gurus hawking books and seminars. Marketers know everyone wants an “Easy Button” to everything and will pay top dollar for the fantasy.
The simple reality is that all successful CEOs don’t buy into this B.S. Yes, they delegate. Yes, they hire good, competent people to do a job and let them do it. Yes, they realize there’s a danger to getting sucked into a million tiny, seemingly important details and overlook or cut short the “big rocks.”
But…
Elon Musk was recently described by one of his employees as “always present” and walking around the plant, talking to people, asking questions and investigating what’s happening on the “shop floor.” Seinfeld was quoted as saying that the reason the show was successful is that he personally micro-managed it. Every word. Every line. Every take. Every edit. The same was said about Michael Jackson and how he meticulously managed every performance, repeating every move again and again, stopping to change a light, change the timing, change the stage until perfect. Trump’s son said the old man can be three steps inside one of his buildings and spot a burnt-out lightbulb 1,000 steps away. Steve Jobs involved himself in every aspect of design, nitpicking tiny details like the shape and size of the trashcan icon.
That’s because HIGHLY successful people can manage both MACRO and MICRO.
Years ago, I was lovingly dubbed a U.N.A., or “unreasonable, nitpicky, arsehole” by my employees. One of them made buttons for everyone to wear with the initials. I had a skill for being a heat-seeking missile for dysfunction and could spot errors, typos and problems within seconds of looking at something.
Trust me when I say this is not a “gift.” Well, not entirely. Yes, it helped me to very quickly assess something – a website, a script, a process. But I spent a good 20% to 30% of my day spotting and correcting errors, then spot checking again and again, digging in, questioning why things were skipped or done wrong, listening to “Well, I just didn’t do it, I guess” over and over again. It IS exhausting, tiresome and intensely infuriating. You tell people. You show people. You hire well. You pay well. Doesn’t matter. They all screw up.
But what makes it inexcusable is when NO ONE is checking to catch the mistakes.
These three morons running a bungee jumping business had ONE JOB. It’s not even complicated. Attach the rope to the person about to be thrown off a bridge. There were THREE of them. Not ONE caught this MAJOR mistake? I believe she was there with friends and other people standing by. NONE of them saw this and intervened? HOW is this possible?
Incredibly, it is possible – and this level of stupid and irresponsible behavior IS going on in YOUR business right now with critical functions, and your desire to be divorced from the details is a dereliction of duty that is unforgivable when it comes to certain aspects of running your organization.
If you’re a manager of people, it is YOUR responsibility to make sure they’re doing the work as prescribed. Trust, but VERIFY the scripts are being followed, the checklist is being used, the precautions are being taken, the work is being done.
Am I saying you should never have any time off? No. But don’t try to put your business on auto-pilot because you think that’s what great CEOs do. Get into your business, roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty working both in AND on. Macro AND micro. It might not be your job, but it is YOUR neck.
