Interlude - Index of

Managing Engineers | 109
Other times you may need to reassign someone or hire a new
person. When you’re a manager, the answer is sometimes do
it yourself, but the larger your organization, the less often this
is true.
Tom’s background is sales, and he knows absolutely nothing
about programming, so imagine my surprise when he used
the programming technique of recursion. By following steps
1 and 2 he concluded that he needed to hire someone to own
a particular problem. Hire someone became the new problem,
and by following steps 1 and 2 he concluded that he wanted to
use an external headhunter. Find a headhunter became the new
problem, and—here we reach the root of the recursion—Tom
identified the owner as the VP of human resources, someone
he trusted to find the headhunter to hire the employee to solve
the problem. Problem solved.
••
Cooperation, collaboration, and consensus are part of NetApp’s
culture. We feel that they make for a better work environment,
better decisions, and better alignment. However, consensus
can lead to paralysis if carried too far. Simply giving one
person ownership for a decision—saying, “You can do whatever
you want!”—would certainly be much faster. How do you
balance between these two extremes? What does it mean to be
the owner of a decision?
My team and I were struggling with these issues, and I
asked Dan for his advice on what it means to delegate the
ownership of a decision to someone. He said: “When I delegate,
I want the owner to identify the key stakeholders and