Those Do-It-All Executives Can Do Great Harm

One day Kenneth Macke, head of the Dayton-Hudson chain, was walking through Dayton’s department store in Minneapolis and noticed a once-popular tearoom where the waiters now outnumbered the customers. He then passed the store’s yogurt stand, which was mobbed by young people and staffed by one harried clerk.

What did Macke do about it, he was asked. “Nothing,” he replied. Why not? Because, he said, “If I had jerked the Dayton company president’s wire, he would have jerked the store manager’s wire, and he would have jerked the floor manager’s wire. . . . Pretty soon, everybody in the whole corporation would be depending on me to play puppeteer.”

The point of the story, recounted by USC professor James O’Toole in his newest book, “Vanguard Management,” is that delegating is essential in a big operation and top executives who don’t bite their tongues now and then when they see something wrong may be asking for trouble.

Anyone who works for a big company knows that there is always the manager who doesn’t take that advice. He’s the one who can’t let go of anything. He has to do it all himself because he doesn’t think anybody else can. Bureaucracies often are full of such people. Usually they don’t make it all the way to the top, but occasionally they do. And then the fun really begins.

Take the case of a man who ran one major California company. His story is told by people who worked for him.

The company offers a number of services to consumers, has grown rapidly and its business has become increasingly complex. By all accounts, this former executive was brilliant and an indefatigable worker. He survived through some of this added complexity but so did his insistence on keeping track of even some of the smallest details of the business.

One way in which he tried to keep track was to insist on monthly activity reports. Lots of companies insist on these things--forcing their managers to stay up late nights at the end of the month to set down on paper what has taken place since the last report. It’s usually a waste of time for the managers, who could be out drumming up new business. It’s often less of a waste of time for the people the monthly activity reports go to because they frequently don’t read them.

In this case, however, the top man not only read them, he sent back detailed comments on them, often asking for more information.

In fact, one thing that characterized this individual’s style was that he reworked everything that came to him. Regardless of the proposal or the plan, he would rewrite it to make it better. The effect, of course, was to slow down the decision-making process at the company. But more than that, it changed the character of management down the line.

“The top people under him became little more than glorified executive secretaries,” says one official at that level. Knowing that he would do their work over, they would often take him the raw material and just wait for him to tell them what to do.

When his successor took over, it took the new executive a while to realize that he had very few decision-makers around the place. He’s had to replace some people because they couldn’t get along without the crutch of someone above them to lean on.

Trapped by his penchant for making all the decisions personally, the do-it-all executive generally rejected most new ideas. Later on, he would present those ideas as his own. But much of his time was spent on more mundane matters, even to checking with individual sales people about routine deals. Despite the fact he couldn’t possibly keep track of so many people and their performances, he insisted on passing personally on most promotions around the company.

Such managers can’t always be written off. Some have so much charisma or personal force that for a time at least they can keep a company running and its people motivated. But O’Toole, who teaches management at USC’s business school, argues that one of the toughest things for managers to learn is that they’re usually more valuable delegating than getting personally involved.

They’re better off acting as authorities, not authoritarians.