Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas Into Action

4.4. Four-Level Decision Making

I learned early in my career that the only way to keep a company moving forward quickly is to give people as much independent decision-making authority as possible. If every decision has to come across your desk, pretty soon the entire organization will come to a grinding halt. However, most employees are really good at reverse-delegating. You assign them a project, and tell them to handle it, and they keep wandering back into your office asking for direction. In a culture that embraces a strong sense of urgency, decisions need to be made at the lowest level possible, with the fewest number of people involved. As a young leader, I thought it was really cool to make all of the decisions because it felt like my ...