#5: Preventing Centralized Command
Thoughts on how I've unintentionally created centralized command in organizations
The Disaster of Centralized Command
I was recently listening to Jocko Podcast 156, which covers the topic of the 20th century Soviet Union and the gulags. In this podcast, Jocko references a story of the most drastic story of centralized command I've ever heard. The story comes from the book Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. Sowell explains:
The significance of free market prices in the allocation of resources can be seen more clearly by looking at situations where prices are not allowed to perform this function. During the era of the government-directed economy of the Soviet Union, for example, prices were not set by supply and demand but by central planners who sent resources to their various uses by direct commands, supplemented by prices that the planners raised or lowered as they saw fit. Two Soviet economists, Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov, described a situation in which their government raised the price it would pay for moleskins, leading hunters to get and sell more of them:
State purchases increased, and now all the distribution centers are filled with these pelts. Industry is unable to use them all, and they often rot in warehouses before they can be processed. The Ministry of Light Industry has already requested Goskomtsen twice to lower purchasing prices, but the “question has not been decided” yet. And this is not surprising. Its members are too busy to decide. They have no time: besides setting prices on these pelts, they have to keep track of another 24 million prices.
This got me thinking...
This story is obviously an extreme example, but for me it highlights an important lesson that all leaders and organizations can learn from. Among many other things, the Soviets created the ultimate culture of centralized command. Because of that, nothing was able to get done. No problems could be tackled. No progress could be made. And this happened at the scale of a country of millions of people.
Ultimately, the success of any organization is dependent on the rate at which it can solve the problem sets associated with its mission.
As I've taken on more leadership responsibility, I've seen myself unintentionally create structures of centralized command. Obviously, not quite at the scale of the Soviet Union, but still enough to where it has lead to a slowdown or even a halt in progress on a particular problem or mission.
So, what causes me to create centralized command structures when I shouldn't?
Someone asks me to do something. There's many times where someone comes to me with a problem that needs to be solved or an action that needs to be taken. The servant leader inside of me leads me to immediately tackle that problem. Without detaching to think through if I'm the best person to solve the problem, I dive in, thinking I'm being a good leader. But, every repetition of this creates a culture of centralized command.
The problem falls into a problem set I used to be responsible for. This one is particularly difficult to handle as you get promoted within an organization. The problem set that you used to be responsible for should now be the responsibility of someone else, and you've got to let that go. Whoever is responsible for that problem set is going to approach it differently than you would, and that's fine.
It's easier (in the moment / short term) to do it yourself than to train someone else. This is a big one. The reality is in the short term, it takes less time to solve this problem yourself. But, when you detach, it's obvious to see how detrimental this approach is. Every time a problem in this set reappears you will once again become the bottleneck.
I need some immediate gratification. I've spent several hours on a big, ugly, important problem, and don't feel like I've got any momentum. I feel stuck. So, I resort to completing lower priority tasks that give me some immediate gratification but are tasks others should complete. This is extremely dangerous, and can lead me to put off the big problems for far too long.
Creating a culture of decentralized command allows the front line team members to tackle their problem set with the confidence it aligns with the broader strategic mission. But, creating the culture of decentralized command is not a trivial task. And if I hope to create decentralized command in the organizations I am a part of, I know the first step is to work on my own shortcomings.
