Trust, but verify. This is a Russian proverb (“doveryay, no proveryay,”) that Ronald Reagan frequently quoted to Mikhail Gorbachev during their Nuclear Treaty discussions. Some of the best leaders at Amazon, like Jeff Wilke, used this phrase too.
In Amazon’s case, it may have been something similar (“Trust but Audit”?? Early Amazonians — tell us what you recall about this in the comments).
In any case, this proverb and its variants are highly relevant for effective management. Here’s why.
Trust means that you should hire and develop a team of leaders who you trust so that you can delegate ownership of specific portions of the business or function to them. If you don’t trust one or more of your direct reports enough to delegate ownership to them, then you, as a leader, have made one of four possible errors:
1. You hired or placed the wrong person in the role
2. You failed to develop the person
3. You have the wrong org design
4. You are a micromanager who is unable or unwilling to delegate
An examination of each management error is out of scope for this post, so let’s assume that you have not erred, that you do trust your reports, and you have effectively delegated ownership to each of them.
This leads us to Verify.
Delegating ownership doesn’t mean that your job is over. You can’t just sit back to wait and see what they decide to do and what results they do or do not deliver.
Effective Management requires processes and mechanisms for:
1. Planning & Goal Setting
2. Metrics & Analysis
3. Review
4. Course Correction
You *should* delegate responsibility to your teams to build plans and set goals, but you *should not* delegate responsibility for the process of how the plans are built, reviewed, and approved before they are enacted.
You should delegate determining the right metrics and deep analysis. However, you should not delegate the process of finally deciding on the right metrics, how they are analyzed, and the deep inspection of those metrics.
You should delegate writing monthly and quarterly business reviews, but you should not delegate defining the template and content for reviews, putting the reviews on the calendar, and conducting effective review sessions where documents are carefully read and spirited discussion and debate lead to clarity and alignment.
You should delegate ownership of suggested course corrections or changes to the plan during the operating year, but you should not delegate the process to review, discuss and debate each proposed change and the final decision.
Verification processes are not micromanagement; they are the management mechanisms that keep you and your organization clear on goals, priorities, and resource allocation.
