Write down, on one sheet of paper, which decisions your manager makes alone and which stay with you, then read it through with the manager, date it and both sign it. That is the decision sheet. On it you list the decisions made on your farm and mark each one at one of four levels: “decides alone”, “decides and tells you”, “consults you first” or “stays with you”.
As a rule of thumb, the manager can decide alone what comes up often, costs little and is easy to undo. The same goes for what follows a written rule, such as a spending cap you write on the sheet. Keep four decisions with you: buying or selling land, buying major machinery such as a tractor or a combine, hiring permanent staff, and selling the crop. Taking on a day worker within a limit you both agree on can be left to the manager.
Without the sheet, this is what happens. A tractor driver wants to swap his day off, goes around the manager and asks you. You answer, because answering is faster than sending him back. The manager watches a decision they were hired to make being made over their head, and the crew learns that the manager’s answer does not count. After a few times the manager stops deciding, the opposite of what you hired them for.
Why does the crew go around the manager when nothing is written?
Because with nothing written, a worker cannot tell which questions belong to the manager and which belong to you, so they take them to the person who has always answered. Gregorio Billikopf wrote Labor Management in Agriculture, a book on managing farm workers published by the University of California. He opens his chapter on delegation with that situation. A grower wondered why his workers came directly to him with their problems and questions, skipping right over the foreman. That foreman stood between the grower and the crew, where your manager stands on your farm.
The grower was the one teaching the workers to skip the foreman. Thinking it over, he realized he was encouraging this behavior by answering questions and solving problems for the employees. The fix was to support his foreman by having employees go to him with these matters.
When nothing is written, there is a second problem: people misread their part in a decision. Billikopf warns that the supervisor needs to carefully communicate with subordinates about their role in the decision process. On your farm, the supervisor is you, and the people under you are the manager and the crew.
His example is a boss who only wants a worker’s opinion on a decision he means to make himself, while the worker thinks the decision has been handed over. Then, he writes, confusion and resentment are likely to follow. The same can happen with your manager: ask their opinion on something you mean to keep, and they may take it as theirs.
What are the four levels on the sheet?
Delegating is not all or nothing. Between “you decide” and “the manager decides” there are steps, and naming them is what lets you put each decision at the right level. Billikopf lays out five. At one end is the traditional use of managerial authority: the boss decides and announces it. At the other end, the boss hands the decision to the people who will carry it out and accepts in advance whatever they decide, within limits set beforehand.
In the three steps in between, the boss hears the others more and more but still makes the final call. He adds that this categorization of decision-making approaches can be applied to any kind of management decision, so the same scale works for a diesel order and for a land purchase.
The sheet keeps the two ends of Billikopf’s scale: “stays with you” is you deciding, and “decides alone” is the manager deciding within limits you set beforehand. Between them the sheet has only two levels, and in both the manager makes the final call. In “decides and tells you”, the manager acts and lets you know afterwards. In “consults you first”, the manager asks your view and then decides, so you both know your view is advice and the decision is the manager’s. Four levels are few enough for a manager to remember while a worker waits for an answer.
Iowa State University’s extension service, which writes for farm families in the United States, advises leaving to one person the routine decisions where others do not need a say.
| Level | What the manager does | Fits a decision that |
|---|---|---|
| Decides alone | Acts without needing to tell you | comes up often, costs little and is easy to undo, or follows a written rule |
| Decides and tells you | Acts, then lets you know | comes up often but costs more than the limit you set for “decides alone” |
| Consults you first | Brings you the options, hears your view, then decides | is costly, hard to undo, or new to the farm |
| Stays with you | Carries out what you decide | commits the whole farm: buying or selling land, buying major machinery, hiring permanent staff, selling the crop |
For example, ordering diesel within the usual monthly amount could be “decides alone”; swapping a worker’s day off, “decides and tells you”; rebuilding a tractor engine, “consults you first”; hiring a new milker, “stays with you”.
Apart from the four that commit the farm, where each decision goes varies from farm to farm: buying a load of feed can be “decides alone” on one farm and “consults you first” on another, depending on what a mistake would cost. What cannot vary is between you and your manager: once the sheet is signed, you both put each decision at the same level.
Which decisions go on the sheet, and at which level?
Start from the decisions actually made on your farm, not from a template: list them, then mark each one. Billikopf notes that most decisions recurring routinely, such as tank filling, supply ordering, and stock culling, are permanently delegated through job descriptions. If you have no written job descriptions, the decision sheet is where these routine decisions get written down for the first time.
Handing them over does not mean losing control of them: managers can exert considerable control over delegated decisions by narrowing the decision-maker’s area of discretion. In practice, that is the limit you write next to each “decides alone”.
Three routine jobs you can hand to the manager depend on something written beforehand, and on the decision sheet you only mark who decides. The first is choosing who earns a reward for good work, such as a day off. The manager can make that choice as long as what earns the reward was written down and shared with the crew first; how to write that rule is set out in how to recognize good work without picking favorites.
The second is walking the shop, the sheds and other work areas with a written safety standard: the manager decides which areas fall short and brings you the list, following the steps in which farm work areas fall short. The third is sitting down with each worker on a set date to talk about their work, then writing in a notebook what the manager and the worker agreed. How to set up the talks and the notebook is set out in how to make coaching a routine.
Sort the decisions by what is at stake, meaning how much they cost and how hard they are to undo, not by subject such as machinery, cattle or people. Billikopf’s rule is that complex decisions require broader involvement but simple ones may be delegated directly to those employees who have the necessary information.
Written rules also help at the “decides alone” level. Oklahoma State University’s extension service, in a fact sheet on farm family decisions, advises you to have pre-established policies as a guide for action in routine situations, rules like the spending cap, agreed before the situation comes up.
If you have written a succession plan, some of this may already be on paper: in it you write who takes each decision for the day you step away, including the four that commit the farm. How to write one is in the written succession plan. On the decision sheet, you write the same thing for the manager you have today.
The manager’s tasks and results go on a different sheet, described in what each role is responsible for. The decision sheet holds what that one leaves out: which decisions the manager can make without you. Other articles on managing a crew are gathered in the people section of the library.
Why does writing it down help delegation work?
Because an owner finds it easier to hand over the decisions they can keep track of. In textile factories in India, far from any farm, a team led by the Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom found that better management, such as daily records of breakdowns and stock, enabled the directors to decentralize more decision making to the plant managers. On the sheet, the “decides and tells you” level is how you keep track of a decision without taking it back.
The manager gains from the sheet too: a manager who knows which decisions are theirs makes them, and one left guessing waits for you.
When does the sheet fail, and what is it not for?
The sheet fails when you use it to give the manager a decision that is not yours to give. An owner may have no boss, but the bank, the landlord and the law all have a say over some decisions, and an arrangement that hands one of those to the manager breaks the first time it is tested. Billikopf’s rule for supervisors applies to you here: a supervisor cannot delegate any more responsibility than he himself has been given by his own boss, and clear limits need to be set. What the manager may legally sign for the farm, such as a contract or a loan, is a question for your lawyer, not for this sheet.
Do not hand everything to the manager at once, either. Billikopf found that delegation and empowerment work best when it is done in small increments. Owners who hand over too much and then watch a decision go wrong tend to take it all back. Hand over more as the manager handles harder decisions well: move one decision at a time one level closer to “decides alone”.
The sheet is not a way to keep watch on the manager, and two things do not go on it. The first is a way for workers to complain about the manager; for that, the crew needs a way to raise a problem that does not go through the manager. The second is keys and passwords, because deciding is not the same as having access: who holds which key and account, such as the bank app or the fuel tank key, goes on a separate list.
Over the long run, leaving decisions unwritten can cost you the manager. The University of Missouri’s extension service writes that a farm succeeds across generations when decision-making authority is not centralized within a single person. It warns that when no one has spelled out who decides what, family and nonfamily business owners or managers may not know whether they have a future with the farm business.
A hired manager is one of those nonfamily managers. One who cannot tell whether any decision is really theirs does not stay to find out, and a raise does not settle a doubt that was never about money. That is one of the reasons covered in why good pay does not keep people.
Where to start
One sheet of paper, one afternoon, no software, and the manager in the room before you sign.
Why does the sheet only work while you keep to it?
Because the crew learns whose answer counts by watching who answers. The first time you answer a question you gave to the manager on the sheet, you cancel that part of the agreement in front of everyone, even though it is still written on the paper. Holding back your answer is up to you alone, and it decides whether the manager you hired gets to work as a manager.
The paper alone is not enough, but writing the agreement down heads off a different disagreement: over what was agreed. Iowa State’s extension service tells family businesses to keep minutes of their meetings for the same reason: unless minutes are kept, disagreements may emerge later over what decisions were reached. The decision sheet is that written record for who decides what. To see where the decision sheet fits into the rest of running a farm, start with the farm management page.