Successful delegation depends on who is doing the delegating. When Captain Delaplace, Commander of Fort Ticonderoga, was awakened in his quarters during the dawn of 10 May 1775 by a wild-eyed Ethan Allen and his band of weekend warriors, known as the Green Mountain Boys, the Captain’s first reaction was aimed directly at Management.
“By whose authority have you entered His Majesty’s Fort?” he demanded.
“In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!” roared Ethan Allen.
Although Captain Delaplace had been schooled in the rigors of the British military service and the traditions of the Royal 26th Regiment of Foot, he was nonetheless a reasonable man and recognized properly delegated authority when he saw it. Noting Allen’s six-foot, six- inch frame and 270 pounds of rock-hard frontier muscle, the murderous glint in the eyes behind the musket leveled at his head, and the reek of 120-proof Bedford distillate that was beginning to permeate the room, the captain decided that the chain of command was complete and that the future lay only in togetherness.
“Let’s talk,” he said, motioning Allen toward the conference room below.
Now it may appear to be a long way from Ticonderoga to present-day research and development. But should it be?
To answer this question, let us examine some of the classic principles of delegation —firstly from the standpoint of how they evolved, and secondly with respect to how they are being applied or misapplied, in our naval weapon development laboratories at the present time.
At the outset it should be recognized that our whole American tradition is based on a do-it-yourself philosophy. The early settlers, the pioneers in the westward expansion, our early industrial giants and military leaders, all helped imbed this philosophy in the American mind. “If you want a job done right, do it yourself!” was the watchword. Little boys were taught to have gumption, and gumption somehow vaguely seemed to preclude delegation.
The foremost contributors to this concept were our industries, which arose almost entirely from one-man, owner-operated businesses. The management typical of this period of industrial growth depended on the personal intercession of the founder himself in almost every detail of the business. Nowadays referred to slightingly as “Caesar management,” it was engaged in then by the greatest names in industry. One of the foremost practitioners of the art was Henry Du Pont, son of the Du Pont company’s founder, Irenee. For 40 years, Henry’s was a one-man control. He personally signed all the contracts, wrote all the checks, and received and distributed the mail. He directly supervised the company’s several hundred salesmen and went on a daily inspection tour of his powder mills in order to keep himself posted on the quality of the work of each employee. On his rounds he even carried along a trowel for rooting out weeds.
Research and development has had a strikingly similar history. In fact, until World War II, it was almost exclusively a one-man affair, whether at the bench in the laboratory, or in the rare front offices that then existed for the managing of research.
This brings us to an obvious question: if do-it-yourself management has worked so well for us in the past, then why all the hoop-la nowadays for delegation?
Well, for one thing, it is obvious that if an executive can divest himself of the lesser chores of management by means of delegation, he is free to apply himself more fully to the important tasks. For another, one-man management geniuses are scarce; there just aren’t enough to go around. For every army or corporation that succeeds because they have this type of management, there are a dozen others that succeed because they don’t attempt it— or that fall flat on their faces because they do.
But perhaps the main reason for being concerned about delegation is that when the one- man genius-manager is suddenly removed from the scene by death, illness, or urgent reassignment, his organization has a tendency to come unglued. This was spectacularly evidenced in the corporate near-collapses that almost invariably followed the passing of the great Caesar managers from our industrial scene. The latter were usually succeeded by lesser men or by boards of directors that were initially impotent in running the companies. It was from this chaos that there gradually evolved a basic set of principles of management and of delegation which has long since grown into administrative doctrine throughout the country. It is hard to understand just why it required corporate agonies on the massive scale of those of the Du Pont empire, and of other corporations almost as large, to unfold some of these principles. They seem obvious as well as simple. Perhaps it is because such financial anarchy affected so many pocketbooks—than which there is hardly any spot more tender.
It nonetheless took the urgencies of World War II to force research and development, especially in the field of weapons, into the mold of big business such as the Office of Scientific Research & Development (OSRD) and the Manhattan Project. Bigness is with us to stay. Science is vastly more complex than in Edison’s day, it does require a task force of hundreds of very capable minds to develop, say, an intercontinental missile, and all this does require a big organization and its invariable concomitant—delegation.
As long as we have to live with these maxims of delegation, let us consider a few of them and then see what has gone wrong with their application to research and development:
1. Decide which aspects of your job are delegable. Typical job factors that can be delgated are (a) details that recur, (b) duties whose delegation will simplify your job, (c) duties that will help train and develop your assistant, and (d) duties that will add interest and importance to his job.
2. Don’t delegate a job you should do yourself. This was the mistake that Miles Standish made with John Alden. Do your own executive planning, as well as the organizing, guiding, training, and disciplining of your subordinates. In other words, attend to your most important duties yourself, and delegate the rest.
3. Don’t overdelegate. Two of our least successful presidents, U. S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, overdelegated their duties, and to men whose capabilities they didn’t know, and whose performances they didn’t check.
4. Keep track. If you know in general what your subordinates are doing, but not exactly, and if you know the plan for the project, but not the details, then you have delegated properly. Delegation is not abdication.
5. As your assistant develops in his job, delegate by easy steps, leading from minor to major duties.
6. Don’t just assign a job. Delegate both authority and responsibility, including the authority to make final decisions. Although you can’t delegate your ultimate responsibility for the job, delegate as much of it as you can.
7. Before you give your assistant the job, make sure he is capable of handling it, and that you have prepared him for it.
8. Delegate only the essentials. Avoid giving detailed instructions. Let the man do it his own way. Don’t expect perfection—delegation is a calculated risk.
9. Once you have delegated a job to someone, leave him alone.
10. Be consistent. Don’t delegate a job and then hamstring your man by withholding the authority, materials, labor, or whatever else he may require to do the job properly.
Now, since all of us are for Mother and against Sin, the above rules seem eminently reasonable—and about as exciting as milk toast. Where the real fun comes in is in their application.
Take Rule six for instance, which says to delegate both authority and responsibility. Most people don’t mind the delegating responsibility part; they won’t generally shrink from letting someone else get the axe when things go wrong. But delegate authority? Not on your life! It is only human to want to run everything yourself—after all, who else knows as much about the subject as you do, or could do the job as well?
A corollary to this deeply imbedded tendency to not delegate is self-deception. We say we delegate when we really don’t. We can emerge from a week-long management seminar literally awash in the high principles of delegation, yet within a week or two the daily routine back at the office erodes our holy dedication to this principle of management down to the bedrock of individualism again and, despite our declarations to the contrary, we find ourselves doing business at the same old stand.
Management aids us in this lip service, partly because of the same subborn resistance to delegation that we have as individuals and partly because of a desire to appear broadminded in the face of the current national mania for egalitarianism. Nobody, not even management, wants to be looked upon as a stuffed shirt by their subordinates.
So much for individual and collective reluctance. Just for the sake of argument, let us assume that everybody wants to delegate, that they are fully convinced of the need for it, and that they really try, over a reasonable period of time. What happens then?
Well, for one thing, you sometimes run smack into incompetence. When this happens, Rule seven—advising you to delegate to someone who is capable of handling the job— goes out the window. And you’re sort of stuck. You may want to replace your incompetent employee with someone from the outside, but it takes real guts to go out and hunt tigers with a pea-shooter in the form of a wholly uncompetitive wage offer. Further, it is hard to oust anyone; the tired tabbies in the government service are preserved for geriatrics by overly protective Civil Service regulations, and in this environment incompetence has come to be a dirty word. These conditions can of course be changed', but not until we have (a) the candor to admit that such problems exist, and (b) the brave but unworldly souls willing to do something about it.
Another thing you’re apt to come up against is vested interest, as defined by Parkinson’s law. Why should a man delegate authority when, by keeping tight rein on it, he can more completely control his organization and perpetuate his own position, which might otherwise come under attack by some Phi Beta subordinate? Vested interest is another almost unprintable epithet in the government service, but no one doubts that it exists and it does inhibit delegation.
However, let’s move along. Let us assume now that we have not only the firm resolve to delegate, mentioned earlier, but also that we have capable people and that they remain free of Parkinsonian self-interest. Will delegation work under this sort of setup? The answer is a resounding “Yes!” It has done so many times. One of the best examples can be seen in the remarkable production record of the Technical Division/Special Projects, BuWeps, which under Rear Admiral Levering Smith (then a captain) was responsible for the Navy’s part of the development of Polaris. Said Admiral Smith, in regard to broad planning in research and development:
“In my opinion the various complexities and hindrances can only be overcome by attracting first-rate technical personnel . . . [who must be] intellectually honest, have undivided loyalty, and be willing for others to carry out the resulting development without detailed direction.”
And therein, as the McGuffey Readers used to say, lies the moral to this story.
It was once put another way by a man who didn’t know much about missiles, but who did know a lot about people: “The best executive,” Teddy Roosevelt once said, “is the one who has sense - enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self- restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”
Neither of the above statements cover one aspect of research and development that is giving considerable trouble, however, even in the best-managed laboratories—the great American fetish for checks and balances. Perhaps because checks and balances are one of the pillars of the Constitution, or because they are the basis of our modern methods of cost-accounting—hallowed doctrines, both—we are harassed all too often by the reluctance of administrators to match the request for a task with the wherewithal to accomplish it. They are inconsistent. They are Indian givers: they delegate the authority and then take some of it back. Administrators say, in effect, “We want you to develop (or test) this gadget. Here is SI00,000. You can spend this for wages, materials, or contract services, but don’t spend any of it for instrumentation” (or for anything else, or see us if you want to spend more than $500, et cetera, ad infinitum).
“Your laboratory is directed to obtain authorization from the Bureau for funds for special equipment,” is the way the directive usually reads. This is a very effective way of hamstringing the project, because almost any research or development task, whether it be large or small, calls for special equipment of one sort or another.
This inconsistency in delegating authority is the handmaiden not only of checks and balances, but also of organizational complexity. In the administration of research and development at the bureau level, it is extremely difficult to delegate a task down through all the departments and divisions, and out to the laboratories, without whittling away some of the original authority. Dr. G. K. Hartmann, Technical Director of the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, White Oak, Maryland, refers to this general problem as “fragmentation of management.” It is a problem of size and of subdivision. There is, says Hartmann, “ a value analysis desk ... a paperwork management desk ... a facilities desk and a personnel desk and a money desk ... a security desk and a safety desk and a travel desk . . . and a contracting desk. . . . But in very few places will you find a desk with authority and responsibility to carry through a single project.” Each desk adds its own standards and restrictions to the project until finally the wonder that the original request emerged in recognizable form is exceeded only by the wonder that it emerged at all—not to mention with a vestige of authority remaining.
“The important thing,” Hartmann adds, “is to bring the authority needed for research and development operations closer to where the operations need it.” This was the fortunate lot of Major General Walter Dornberger and his fellow scientists in their early work on the V-2 and other rockets at Peenemunde. They worked under only the most general of directives. “Our work could succeed only if we could manage to keep Peenemunde free from excessive red tape and cramping regulations,” wrote Dornberger. “In that struggle we were engaged without respite throughout our work. . . . Army Administration and the Experimental Station Branch of the Army Weapons Department had no say.”
The parent organization had no say! That is how they built the V-2.
If we agree with Hartmann that more authority is needed at the operations level, we might go about getting it in one of two ways—either piecemeal, or by revolution. Since the latter method has been looked upon with increasing distaste as time widens the gulf between us and the days of Ethan Allen, let us consider only the piecemeal approach. We might best put, it in the form of three questions: What authority do the laboratories already have? In what specific areas does lack of authority hamstring their operations? What authority, therefore, do they need?
At first glance the authority that the laboratories already have looks fairly impressive. They have the authority to hire employees. They can spend money on programs as authorized by the parent bureau, and they have authority to re-program project funds for ancillary purposes. They can spend money for technical equipment and instrumentation, and for exploratory and foundational research. They can let contracts for research and development. And they can alter or improve construction facilities.
But inasmuch as the laboratories are public enterprises, their spending necessarily comes under public scrutiny and control. This in itself is reasonable. It is the degree and kind of control that turns out to be the fly in the ointment, the overalls in the chowder.
For instance, although the laboratories can hire, the arbitrary limits set by Congress on Civil Service salary scales and educational leave put the government laboratories at a serious disadvantage in recruiting: recruits smart enough for the laboratories to be interested in are smart enough to be hired into industry at higher salaries and with other benefits in the form of liberal educational leave for graduate work and fellowships. Many government scientists feel that the laboratories need not only the authority to meet such competition, but also that they should be able to go considerably beyond this and establish the standard.
Another example of lack of local authority is in the field-of publications, specifically in the requirements for excessive, detailed reporting of non-technical matters, and the over-regulation in technical reporting. In the latter case, the laboratories are subservient to not one but five regulatory agencies: the naval districts, the bureaus, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing. The main target of these agencies seems to be anything identifiable as “promotional,” and one regrettable result has been that many a sound technical proposal has been shot down in flames during takeoff when it was mistaken for a promotion piece. This sensitivity on the part of the regulatory agencies is admittedly a consequence of glaring excesses in the past, but it can be argued with some logic that it might be better therapy for one doctor to treat the patient according to a single diagnosis than for five of them to prescribe potions at random.
A third instance where insufficient authority has been delegated is in the funding of exploratory and foundational research, known colloquially as E&F. The directors of the laboratories have long urged the parent bureaus to increase their budgets for work judged by the laboratory to be of promise or importance, and to eliminate the standard requirements of prior justification, review or approval at higher levels, or that such work be conducted on a non-interference basis. This appeal stems from the demonstrable premise that a prime wellspring of ideas lies within the ranks of the scientists at the working level in the laboratories, and that financial exploitation of this phenomenon would pay off ultimately in increased production of weapons. As a case in point, one West Coast laboratory has the authority to spend two million dollars annually for E&F work; it is their considered opinion that this amount is seriously out of balance with their applied research and development work, and that it should be increased to about five million dollars, or 10 per cent of their total budget. Some think it should be as high as 25 per cent.
Authority for the laboratories to contract for research and development work also suffers from under-delegation. As things now stand, one of our large naval laboratories cannot independently negotiate a contract in excess of §10,000; anything beyond this figure has to be referred to the Navy Purchasing Office. In rush development projects involving millions of dollars of work, this becomes a time-consuming problem that can shatter a project schedule. A reasonable independent authority here would be $100,000. This might not be enough, but at least it would bring the figure up from the microscopic realm where it now resides.
Possibly the most salient example of nondelegation, however, is the limiting of facilities-construction authority to $5,000 per job. This amount might be appropriate for a very small establishment, but it is patently insufficient in the case of a large laboratory having an annual budget of 80 million dollars. Yet such a laboratory is saddled with this restriction, and must go hat-in-hand to the parent bureau and make a special justification for any alteration or improvement in one of its buildings if it exceeds this figure, which is only .0000625 of its annual budget, and perhaps only a tenth of what it should be. In one laboratory this happens almost weekly, in the form of a request for alteration of a basement area to gain more office space, or minor expansion of a propellant research building to meet the needs of an urgent missile development program, or the limited modification of a building in order that it can house adequately a half-million dollars’ worth of computer equipment. Such are only a few instances of several score, each of which required a command performance of high- level laboratory personnel at headquarters in Washington, D. C.—3,000 miles away—when they could have been better employed at home base addressing themselves to the urgent task of producing the weapons.
What the foregoing all boils down to, of course, is the philosophical fact that delegation is merely the mechanism. What you are really dealing with is people. If you can generate policy, if you have loyal and intelligent people whom you can trust to interpret it, and if you are willing to give them the authority they need despite the inevitable risk that mistakes will be made—then you are indeed delegating.
A classic example of the kind of delegation we are considering comes from the annals of naval operations. According to Captain Malcolm W. Cagle, U. S. Navy, who chronicled the event, this particular instance of delegation was initiated in 1855 by Jefferson Davis, who was Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. Jeff Davis wanted some camels brought here from the Near East to determine their feasibility as a means of transportation on the western American desert (R&D, you see?). Would the Navy be so good as to get them?
The Navy would, and they had just the man. Lieutenant (later Admiral) David Dixon Porter had initiative, energy, professional ability, and had served in the East before. He was personally and technically qualified in every way but one: it might be said that he didn’t know beans about camels. Now the Navy knew even less, but was perceptive enough to recognize the fact, and to know that this was a time to delegate. And delegate it did— the whole task, with complete authority.
Porter proceeded to the New York Navy Yard, took command of the 141-foot sailing vessel assigned him, on his own initiative converted her for camel transport by building a 60-foot-long barn on her deck (complete with camel-accommodation hatch, ventilation hatches, hay racks, and water tubs), designed and built an LCC for transporting the beasts from beach to ship, provisioned his vessel for the long voyage, and on 3 June 1855 stood away for Italy. Upon arrival he got his first lessons in cameliering from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who maintained a herd on his estate. Porter next proceeded to Tunis, where he took aboard three of the critters, and thence to the Crimea, where he investigated the use of camels in a war that was going on.
On 29 November—by now a self-educated expert—he docked in Alexandria, where he called upon the Viceroy of Egypt for the export of ten of the brutes. When they were delivered a week later, Porter found them to be the most wretched hulks in all Islam. At his own instance he thereupon wrote a stinging letter of reprimand to the Viceroy (without benefit of President, Press Secretary, or State Department), saying, in part, “We have too good a country, my dear sir, to allow anyone to depreciate it by such offerings.”
He got his ten good camels.
After one more stop, at Smyrna, Porter sailed for home with 33 camels aboard. On 14 May 1856 he delivered them F.O.B. Indianola, Texas, having got them safely across 4,000 miles of ocean by virtue of good seamanship, sulphur, and paregoric.
Delegation, anyone?