Question

Jay Fulcher, the CEO of Zenefits, recently convened ten of his top executives for a management meeting, during which he asked them a personal question, “What would happen if you got sick?” He wanted to know that departments would continue to function if the people running them needed to care for themselves or a loved one due to the pandemic. How can a leader know with any degree of confidence that his/her “number two” can handle to responsibilities to lead/run a department? What are some of the likely reasons that leaders don’t spend an appropriate amount of time and resources on these types of “what if” scenarios?

Answer 1

There may be chances or occasions where the readers may not be present in the office due to any illness or any personal assignment. The responsibility of taking care of the organizational activities in these cases will fall on the number two position. In order to find out whether the number 2 in the organization will be able to handle the operations effectively, the following methods can be used-

Even in normal circumstances, the leader can give the opportunity to run and manage the entire operations to the number 2 even in his presence and he can monitor how well the operations are managed.

He can create some emergency situations and ask the number two to handle without involving the leader in those situations. This will help the leader to gauge how effectively an emergency situation can be managed by number two.

There can be an occasional rotation of the responsibility to the number 2 in which the persona has to act as the leader and manage the work of the organization.

The most important reason why these sorts of practices are not carried out by the leaders of the organization is that the leaders never think that they will fall sick or they will not be able to manage the operations of the organization. Secondly, the leaders can think that they can lose their effectiveness if the second number individual performs better than him so the feeling of insecurity prevents them to utilize this resource.