Should You Use the Captain’s Call?
According to the Urban Dictionary, a Captain’s Call is a decision made unilaterally by a team leader without consulting colleagues, often resulting in a massive CF, which, to be clear, is an acronym representing two words – first word, “cluster”
In the majority of cases, these Captain’s Calls are seen by team members as being out of touch, nonsensical, and driven by self interest.
This begs the question, is there any situation where making a captain’s call would be appropriate and, if so, when might that be? I can think of 3…
- When bringing major cultural change to a company
If you are brought in with a change and reform mandate, as I was in several of the roles I held during my executive career, more often than not you’ll see a pressing need to depart from the status quo.
If you rely solely on the decisions being made below your level, you’ll find pretty quickly that they are designed to maintain the status quo.
Not making decisions that are contrary to the lower level decisions that your leaders would otherwise have made is a recipe for stagnation. - When stopping non-value adding activity
In some of the companies I worked in, people were spending huge amounts of investment capital on things that either weren’t adding value, or were squandering capital inefficiently.
I made a habit of asking, for any major investment, “Show me how, when, and where the value will be delivered from this investment.”
If they couldn’t do that, they obviously didn’t understand the economics well enough to be given stewardship of the company’s resources.
The falls into the category of stopping the dumb shit, would should be a primal instinct in every leader. - To avert an imminent disaster
When you can see a really bad decision just about to be made, sometimes it’s necessary to step in… but not always
People have to be given the room to make mistakes, to learn, and to grow, so it’s only the rarest, highest risk cases that would be sensible for you to jump in with a Captain’s Call.
Even though these situations may warrant your intervention, you need to use them sparingly, because they have three big downsides
- You’re often a long way away form the action
If the people below you can’t articulate why a certain decision is in the best interests of the company, it’s even less likely that they can articulate the pros, the cons, and the risks of that decision…
They’re much closer to the detail than you are, so you need to be mindful of the unforeseen risks and issues that may be lurking. - Captain’s calls erode the accountability culture
The minute you intervene, you naturally assume a level of accountability for the outcomes, for better or for worse.
You can’t hold someone individually accountable if you’ve trumped their decision-making authority, and effectively directed them to do something they wouldn’t have chosen to do, if they had been able to exercise their own choice. - Kills discretionary effort
When people feel as though their autonomy is under siege, they become deflated and apathetic… why bother? “No matter what I do, Marty will override me, so it doesn’t really matter what I do”
Captain’s calls are sometimes necessary, but they’re never free… which is why it’s important that you understand the cost before you make them!