The Hindu Business Line : <I>The pain of delegating </I>

Among the skills they do not teach you at a B school, one of the more important ones is the art of delegating the power to take risky decisions, which involve making a judgment to someone thousands of miles away. In some large multinational corporations, it was taken for granted that at 23 you would supervise a group of people almost twice your age, and command professional respect, though you had learnt the basics of the job from the same people, just a few months before. The company expected you to administer its policies and take decisions on the run. The complexity of delegation is of managing at a distance.

While the Sales Director may appear to have impressive power over a number of distant branch offices, he still carries the monkey on his back. Where other people have to take day-to-day decisions about business and associates, he can only hope that they act in the interests of the organisation. Still, regardless of training, briefing and communication, the worry will remain that some one some day will perpetrate a monumental clanger and land him in a mess.

The most impressive argument in favour of rewarding the sales managers and chiefs of marketing well is that all the results are finally laid at their doorsteps, yet they cannot be physically in touch with those producing the results. The factory manager, the HR manager or even the CEO can walk down the aisle or the corridors of his office building and be in direct face-to-face conversations with those whose results he is responsible for.

The field operation is different. You may have agreed on some policies and said something to various people over the phone but soon you are going to find that the manager in one region has interpreted what you said differently from the way his colleague a thousand miles away has done.

It is not always possible to take care of costly misjudgments by sacking the person responsible or as the civil services do, transfer the offending manager to a far away spot as a `punishment posting'. It is often more difficult to replace field officers than it is to get another accountant; and more difficult to run vacant territories.

Of course, there have been attempts in businesses such as project-based industries, hospitality services and industrial or technology companies, to evade this altogether by having a different structural solution. These are usually of two kinds. Either the regional boss is so empowered that he can pretty much run his own fiefdom, subject to some overall guidelines, or the entire task of supervision is handed over to technology with an intranet, instantaneous communication followed by monthly face-to-face reviews with the top management, which basically results in a national sales force being run as if there were just one controlling office, except for minor routine matters.

This, in the age of the mobile phone, laptop and broadband, shrinks distances. What it can never replace is the need for the head-office senior managers to go out on tour into the field. Beyond the need to supervise in person, the far more important objective of such sales tours is picking up the weak signals from the market at first hand, getting a personal sense of the strengths and weaknesses of individuals among both the trade and customers — which has no substitutes at all.

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