Trust but Verify

Those of you who are 50 or older will remember this Ronald Reagan saying. To me, this is nothing more than closing a loop. If you are a manager of 10 people and your team makes commitments to get something done, are you doing your job if you just assume everything is done right and on time? The absence of any information means that all is good, right? Wrong, it means you are in an ambush and something negative is about to happen. All a manager needs to do is to set up a system where people self-report when their actions or projects are complete, and then the manager periodically reviews to make sure things were done properly and gives coaching comments where appropriate. If you don’t find a way to verify, then you are abdicating your responsibilities. You won’t catch everything that perhaps was not completed properly, but you will be a better manager.

Some people have the perception that when you verify something that you are “micro-managing”. That is flat out – WRONG! It is actually a part of MANAGING. When people brought that up in the past, I gave some examples of micro-managing – basically outlining every single step of a process that they need to accomplish and what to do with each piece of information they gather. They quickly understand that simple verification of the completion of a task is not remotely close to micro-managing. It is inevitable that if you stop verifying critical tasks that they will start getting missed. People aren’t perfect no matter how hard the try, and I would prefer to find out that someone didn’t complete a task or project during my verification so that we could rectify the situation before it became a much bigger issue that could affect product safety, quality, or expectations of the customer.