When you run the hundred yard dash, you win by yourself. When you work as statistician or a copy writer, you get ahead largely on the basis of your own work too. But when you are manager, it is the first performance of the people under you- your organization-that determines how well you do. How do you win your assistants and your subordinates?

This is the main question we shall examine in this article.  What kinds of things can you do to increase your luck as a decision maker?  And what things will help you to be luckier with the people in your organization?

Being on a man or betting on a group of men means wagering that, given a fair chance to show what they can do on their own, they will produce good results.  They won’t succeed all the time, of course, but their successes will outweigh their failures.

Also, you can with young men,  with new men-not just with the tried – and tested veterans.  There is no gamble at all involved if you give a selling assignment to a star salesman, or an accounting assignment to a seasoned accountant.  Betting on people means that you can take chances with them, accept risks on behalf of them.  My experience over long stretch is that executives who fear youth and inexperienced are too often wrong.  More of our mistakes come from fixed convictions than from taking chance.  More opportunities have been killed then errors avoided by answering, “we are not sure he can take the responsibility”, or “How do we know he can handle this job?”.

Why the odds are in your favour – there are several basic reasons that the odds are in your favour when you bet intelligently on the abilities of your subordinates.

First, men and women seem to venture with greater determination to win when they know that the question of success or failure is upto them and when, inspite of the skeptism their more staid associates they are given freedon to act.  For instance, in an atmosphere such a progressive decentrised management produces, men learn quickly to recover their voice and confidence when they make mistakes and suffer failures.  Under such conditions they do more thinking and better thinking and producing more work and better work since their thinking tones into action and action into accomplishment.