Page 400 - Ray Dalio - Principles

c. An excellent skier is probably going to be a better ski coach than a novice skier. Believability applies to
management too. The better your track record, the more value you can add as a coach.
d. You should be able to delegate the details. If you keep getting bogged down in details, you either have a
problem with managing or training, or you have the wrong people doing the job. The real sign of a
master manager is that he doesn’t have to do practically anything. Managers should view the need to
get involved in the nitty-gritty as a bad sign.
At the same time, there’s danger in thinking you’re delegating details when you’re actually being
too distant from what’s important and essentially are not managing. Great managers know the
difference. They strive to hire, train, and oversee in a way in which others can superbly handle as
much as possible on their own.

10.4 Know what your people are like and what makes them
tick, because your people are your most important
resource.

Develop a full profile of each person’s values, abilities, and skills. These qualities are the real
drivers of behavior, so knowing them in detail will tell you which jobs a person can and cannot do
well, which ones they should avoid, and how the person should be trained. These profiles should
change as the people change.
If you don’t know your people well, you don’t know what you can expect from them. You’re
flying blind and you have no one to blame but yourself if you don’t get the outcomes you’re
expecting.
a. Regularly take the temperature of each person who is important to you and to the organization. Probe your key
people and urge them to bring up anything that might be bothering them. These problems might be
ones you are unaware of, or they may be misunderstood by the person raising them. Whatever the
case, it is essential that they be brought out into the open.
b. Learn how much confidence to have in your people—don’t assume it. No manager should delegate
responsibilities to people they don’t know well. It takes time to learn about people and how much
confidence you can vest in them. Sometimes new people are offended when their managers don’t
have confidence in how they are carrying out their responsibilities. They think it’s a criticism of
their abilities when it’s simply a matter of the manager being realistic about the fact that he or she
hasn’t had enough time or direct experience with them to form a point of view.
c. Vary your involvement based on your confidence. Management largely consists of scanning and probing
everything you are responsible for to identify suspicious signs. Based on what you see, you should
vary your degree of digging, doing more for people and areas that look suspicious, and less where
what you see instills confidence. At Bridgewater a host of tools (Issue Logs, metrics, daily updates,
checklists) produce objective performance-related data. Managers should review and spot-check
them regularly.

10.5 Clearly assign responsibilities.

Eliminate any confusion about expectations and ensure that people view their failures to complete
their tasks and achieve their goals as personal failures. The most important person on a team is the
one who is given the overall responsibility for accomplishing the mission. This person must have
both the vision to see what should be done and the discipline to make sure it’s accomplished.
a. Remember who has what responsibilities. While that might sound obvious, people often fail to stick to
their own responsibilities. Even senior people in organizations sometimes act like young kids just
learning to play soccer, running after the ball in an effort to help but forgetting what position they
are supposed to play. This can undermine rather than improve performance. So make sure that
people remember how the team is supposed to work and play their positions well.
b. Watch out for “job slip.” Job slip is when a job changes without being explicitly thought through and
agreed to, generally because of changing circumstances or a temporary necessity. Job slip often