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The Attention to Minor Details Averts Major Problems

The saying, “the devil is in the details” is true in all organizational and business environments. Often when leaders take the time to empower their employees and teams to handle minor details and problems, major problems are avoided or at least minimized.

The process of transformation and change with an organization demands that countless decisions be made on a daily basis. The concept of effective leadership drives decisions lower within the organization to the front lines so that decisions can be made quickly where and when they count. While leaders must be in the midst of their organization monitoring what is happening and assisting where needed, they cannot be omnipresent, nor can they make all decisions required to make the organization run smoothly.

It is vital that leaders enable and rely on employees to handle details and small problems on their own, as these are the situations and circumstances where trust and empowerment are formed. An atmosphere of trust encourages and empowers employees to take risks and make decisions “on the fly” when they are needed. Often many of these minor decisions directly impact both their workplace and productivity by resolving nagging problems and frustrations—and avoiding major problems later on.

Related: Success Is the Sum of Details

Leaders Cannot Be Everywhere at Once

Leaders must understand that as they cannot be omnipresent they have the tools of delegation, empowerment and trust at their disposal to extend their reach to all corners of the organization. While they can and should be present within the organization and actively interacting with their employees, they must also trust their people to solve problems and frustrations without their direct intervention, unless the issue is beyond the scope of the employee’s/workgroup’s responsibility.

Empowering individuals to resolve issues before they blossom into larger and more expensive problems to solve also frees the leader to address more important problems and responsibilities.

Delegate and Empower

Leaders must create a positive atmosphere of trust where minor problems, details and issues can be effectively resolved by individual frontline employees, workgroups and teams. While this process may start slowly, especially when it hasn’t been freely employed in the past, leaders and employees must develop a growing bond of trust allowing them to make more tactical decisions, with the leader daily interacting and monitoring activities.

Push Decision Making to the Frontline Employee

Regardless of their capacity or station, the frontline employee must be trained to be the eyes of the organization. These employees have an up close gritty and extremely useful perspective of what is happening “in the trenches” of the organization. Once trained, they see what is happening and what is causing problems and frustrations, where in the past they might have either ignored these concerns out of fear or apathy or reported them and hoped for the best. Now rather than waiting for the bureaucratic process to resolve problems, or being reluctant, leaders have equipped their people to generate solutions “on the fly.”

Encourage and Reward Risk Taking

When decision-making is driven downward to frontline employees, levels of reluctance and fear may surface. There will be fear of the repercussions of making the wrong decision, especially if a more risk-adverse environment existed in the past. Each individual decision has some risk associated with it. There is always the likelihood that the decision will be wrong, further complicating the problem.

Leaders must foster an atmosphere where employees are encouraged to make careful decisions regardless of circumstances. In every situation employees consider all aspects of their decisions and associated risks. They make informed decisions based upon their personal experience, expertise and the available information shared with them.

Learn from Mistakes and Failures

While employees are being cultivated to make informed decisions, it is easy to review the basis for decisions and the reasons why they may have turned out poorly. Once looked at, lessons can be derived from the mistake or failure. Within the confines of a learning organization, mistakes and failures should be encouraged since this is only how employees can learn and grow.

Organizations with zero-tolerance for mistakes and failures are only fooling themselves, as even of course with these rigid standards, mistakes and failures happen—and are often hidden from managers and leaders. These poor outcomes fester into bigger problems, often blindsiding leadership later and derailing any or much of the progress made.

Excerpt: Improving Workplace Interaction: Pinpoint Leadership Skill Development Training Series (Majorium Business Press, Stevens Point, WI 2011) $ 16.95 USD

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

September 4, 2012 at 11:59 am

Posted in Attention to Detail, Employees, Empowerment, Leadership

Tagged with decision-making, delegation, employees, empowerment, encouragement, Leadership, open workplace environment, problem solving, risk, trust, zero-tolerance for mistakes

Success is the Sum of Details

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Harvey Firestone - Firestone Tire

Harvey Firestone (Firestone Tire) stated, “success is the sum of details.” The great leaders uniformly paid extraordinary close attention to details. Throughout this book it is frequently referenced, since it is an important attribute or aspect of their thinking. It influenced virtually every aspect of their lives, which ranged from ruthless efficiency to product quality, to how they treated their employees. As architects of growth, their attention to detail allowed them to formulate comprehensive plans and blueprints, which supported the building and growth of their companies.

Many leaders like James J. Hill (Great Northern Railway), Sam Walton (Wal-Mart) and Robert Wood (Sears) all devoured as much data and information as they could get their hands on, to generate detailed plans and blueprints for their business, as did William Boeing (Boeing) and John Jacob Astor. Bill Gates (Microsoft) “also has incredible focus and knowledge of his industry. As Ross Perot once noted, ‘Gates is a guy who knows his product.’ ”

In addition to paying close attention to details, the great leaders developed unparalleled competence and expertise through years of experience. They all emerged from long and dark valleys of frustration, disappointment, adversity and often failure, which tested their mettle, polished their skills and competencies and generated deep levels of perseverance and resilience. None of the great leaders surveyed ever appeared to succeed without first enduring what I call a long and frustrating “crucible period.” These experiences and the lessons gained within this “crucible period” allowed them to possess the necessary skills, experience and expertise to take advantage of opportunities presented to them. They were able to recognize them for what they were, and knew how to plan and profit from them. A notable example is Theodore Vail (AT&T). He “left the post office service to establish the telephone business. He had been in authority over thirty-five hundred postal employees, and was the developer of a system that covered every inhabited portion of the country. Consequently, he had a quality of experience that was immensely valuable in straightening out the tangled affairs of the telephone. Line by line, he mapped out a method, a policy, a system. He introduced a larger view of the telephone business… He persuaded half a dozen of his post office friends to buy stock, so that in less than two months the first ‘Bell Telephone Company’ was organized, with $450,000 capital and a service of twelve thousand telephones.”

In 1902, one hundred years after it was founded, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, commonly known as DuPont, was sold by the surviving partners to three of the great-grandsons of the original founder, led by Pierre du Pont. He had grown up in the family business and had developed the necessary expertise to assume control over it. He understood the associated problems, issues and weaknesses that needed to be rectified, and drafted and executed the necessary plans to transform the company. “As chief of financial operations, Pierre du Pont oversaw the restructuring of the company along modern corporate lines. He created a centralized hierarchical management structure, developed sophisticated accounting and market forecasting techniques, and pushed for diversification and increasing emphasis on research and development. He also introduced the principle of return on investment, a key modern management technique. From 1902 to 1914, Pierre kept a firm rein on the company’s growth, but with the onset of World War I he guided DuPont through a period of breakneck expansion financed by advance payments on Allied munitions contracts.”

As a primary supplier of paints and lacquers required for automotive production, DuPont became a major investor in General Motors. Pierre DuPont replaced William Durant, the company’s founder, as CEO. DuPont made a key decision in promoting Alfred Sloan to the office of president. Sloan developed a detailed blueprint that transformed GM into the largest industrial company the world had ever known at that time. He “created structure so people could be more creative with their time and have it be well spent. He also came up with the idea that senior executives should exercise some central control but should not interfere too much with the decision making in each operation. It is difficult to describe many of Sloan’s ideas because most of them would seem like common concepts of a business, yet they were new and innovative at the time. Largely due to his invention, GM became the pioneer in market research, public relations and advertising. Before Sloan, people had totally different conceptions of these common parts of the American corporation.” Due to Sloan’s success, his corporate model highly influenced the development of the modern American corporation. His theories were actively practiced for over 50 years and remained unchallenged until Jack Welch’s (General Electric) influence permeated the mid-1980s.

^[1] Maury Klein, The Change Makers (Henry Holt and Company, LLC, New York, NY 2003) p. 106-107

^[2] Casson Herbert N., The History of the Telephone. Chapter II (February 1, 1997)

^[3] Pierre S. du Pont: 1915 (www2.dupont.com)

^[4] Alfred P. Sloan, Inventor of the Modern Corporation (Invent Help Invention Newsletter, August 2004)

Excerpt: Great! What Makes Leaders Great: What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It (Majorium Business Press, 2011)

If you would like to learn more about how the great American leaders attention to details to build plans and blueprints and formulate strategies for their business, refer to Great! What Makes Leaders Great: What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It. It illustrates how great leaders built great companies, and how you can apply the strategies, concepts and techniques that they pioneered to improve your own leadership skills.Click here to learn more.

Written by Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.

November 3, 2011 at 12:02 pm

Posted in Attention to Detail

Tagged with adversity, attention to details, blueprints, competence, competencies, corporate model, crucible period, disappointment, experience, expertise, failure, focus, frustration, knowledge, perseverance, plans, resilience, skills

The Person in Charge Must Be Concerned About the Details

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The United States Nuclear Navy has an enviable record for engineering excellence and safety. From its inception in the 1940s, Admiral Hyman Rickover (U.S. Navy) established exacting standards for every aspect of its operation. Not content to remain

Admiral Hyman Rickover on an Inspection Tour

behind a desk, he was present on the bridge of every newly launched vessel as it underwent its sea trials. He was truly immersed in the details of each project and every mission, and left nothing to chance. This included interviewing every naval officer before they were allowed into the nuclear program. He stated that, “The man in charge must concern himself with details. If he does not consider them important, neither will his subordinates. Yet ‘the devil is in the details.’ It is hard and monotonous to pay attention to seemingly minor matters. In my work I probably spend about 99 percent of my time on what others may call petty details. Most managers would rather focus on lofty policy matters. But when the details are ignored, the project fails. No infusion of policy or lofty ideals can then correct the situation. To maintain proper control one must have simple and direct means to find out what is going on. There are many ways of doing this; all involve constant drudgery. For this reason those in charge often create ‘management information systems’ designed to extract from the operation the details a busy executive needs to know. Often the process is carried too far. The top official then loses touch with his people and with the work that is actually going on.”

Colin Powell (U.S. Army) noted, “Sometimes details are neglected because they’re not sexy enough… Running anything is primarily an enormous amount of grubby detail work and very little excitement, so deal making is kind of romantic, sexy. That’s why you have deals that make no sense. Good leaders don’t view details… as grubby. They view the mastery of detail as an integral part of leadership.”

As military leaders, both Rickover and Powell recognized the value of being immersed in details. They understood that in a combat environment, overlooked details can be costly in many ways, especially regarding the lives of the men and women who serve under them. This immersion in detail was also observed in other military leaders, including Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant and Robert Wood (Sears).

A desire to immerse themselves in details isn’t limited to military leaders. It was observable in the behaviors of other great leaders, including Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Elizabeth Arden (Elizabeth Arden), and Estée Lauder (Estée Lauder) to cite a few.

William Boeing (Boeing) began his career in the lumber business before he saw the future of aviation. In addition to Boeing he also created the United Aircraft Corporation and United Airlines as subsidiaries. (The Federal government ultimately broke-up Boeing as a monopoly in 1934.) As Boeing grew his aviation business, “[he] continued to run his timber business and was able to absorb details of both lumber and airplane enterprises. Years later, he could recall the description and topography of a parcel of land and the species and quality of timber that it would yield. He believed in details and told his managers that many a wrong decision stemmed from a detail overlooked or incorrectly interpreted.”

Another aviation pioneer, Juan Trippe (Pan American Airways) immersed himself in every detail of his emerging business. “When [he] got Pan American Airways into the air in 1927 he knew every wrinkle in its flying equipment (a lone tri-motored Fokker), every part in his stockroom, every wavelet in the go-mile mail route between Key West and Havana.”

When viewed from the perspective of “ruthless efficiency,” the practice of immerging oneself in the details of managing a successful enterprise makes absolute sense. Large and widespread companies by their very nature, creates potential waste and duplication. This is underscored by a report issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in March 2010 entitled, Opportunities to Reduce Potential Duplication in Government Programs, Save Tax Dollars, and Enhance Revenue, which reported wide spread waste and duplication of efforts throughout the Federal government, costing taxpayers up to $200 billion annually.

The great leaders intuitively understood the potential for waste within large organizations, and immersed themselves in the details of their businesses to increase efficiencies, drive down costs and improve profitability. John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil) is a notable example. “Of all the lessons John absorbed from his father, perhaps none surpassed in importance that of keeping meticulous accounts… The titan had to know to the last pipe, to the last oil storage tank at each of his refineries, to the last Standard Oil tanker at sea, to the last penny in Standard Oil’s Accounts Receivable, and to the last of whatever else he could think of in his business, where everything was, how the item or person served his purposes, and their exact value.”

Oprah Winfrey (Harpo Productions) openly admits her lack of management acumen. She delegates that aspect of the business to professional managers within her organization. Yet, this does not stop her from immersing herself in the details of her business. “Everything is personal at Harpo. While Oprah does delegate operational decisions, she is all over her content. Before O gets shipped to the printer, she reads every word and scrutinizes every picture—typically working on the magazine, via her office PC, from 3 P.M. to 8 P.M. Tuesday through Thursday and all day Friday, when she doesn’t shoot her show. ‘She’s into every little… thing, the commas, the exclamation points,’ says Gayle King, who, as editor-at-large, is Oprah’s eyes and ears at the Manhattan-based magazine.”

Winfrey’s attention isn’t just limited to her content. She personally signs all checks and pays close attention to how her money is being spent.

Excerpt: Great! What Makes Leaders Great: What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It (Majorium Business Press, 2011)

If you would like to learn more about the attention to detail exhibited by of the great American leaders through their own inspiring words and stories, refer to Great! What Makes Leaders Great: What They Did, How They Did It and What You Can Learn From It. It illustrates how great leaders built great companies, and how you can apply the strategies, concepts and techniques that they pioneered to improve your own leadership skills.Click here to learn more.