Hired managers are 6,902 of the 114,868 producers (the census word for the people who run a farm) that the 2022 Census of Agriculture counted in Minnesota, about 1 in 17. If you hired one, the decision in front of you is which of your crew’s questions you still answer. Each answer takes a decision away from the manager, and in a laboratory game with 504 students, between 30% and 50% of the players who could be overruled made no effort at all. Write a one-page decision sheet of who decides what, with a spending limit on each decision the manager makes alone, sign it together, and send the manager’s questions back to the manager.
Who does the crew ask when the manager is right there?
Whoever has always answered. A worker goes to the person who answered before, and nothing tells that worker the question now belongs to someone else. Gregorio Billikopf, a farm labor adviser with the University of California, tells of a farmer who wondered why his workers skipped the foreman and came straight to him. The farmer then saw that he was encouraging it by answering questions and solving problems for the employees, so he began sending them back to the foreman.
Billikopf also warns that each person needs to know their part in a decision. When a boss only wants a worker’s opinion and the worker believes the decision is now his, confusion and resentment are likely to follow. Your manager can misread you the same way: if you ask for an opinion on something you mean to decide yourself, the manager may take the decision as theirs.
Who gives orders to each worker goes in the written job description, the page that says what each person does and who they answer to. The decision sheet is a second page, and it says what the manager decides.
Send the question back the first time it arrives, before the crew learns where the answers come from.
What happens to a manager who knows you can undo the decision?
Some stop trying. The economists Ernst Fehr, Holger Herz and Tom Wilkening tested this in a game with 504 students. Two players could each put in effort to find out which of several projects paid best, much as a manager might check prices before a purchase. The best project for one was not the best for the other. Only one of them had the final say, the right to make the last call on which project was chosen, and that player could ignore the other’s proposal and waste the other’s effort.
Among the players without the final say, between 30 and 50 percent, depending on the setup, chose to put in no effort at all. The players who held the final say, for their part, put in more effort than the best play required. The authors call the group that stopped a substantial minority, so most players without the final say kept working.
The players were students in an abstract game, so your manager will not follow the same percentages. Some managers keep working at their decisions even when they know you can overrule them, and you cannot tell in advance which kind you hired.
Handing over the final say paid in two of the four setups. Players who did it earned on average 30.4 percent more than those who kept it in one setup and 44.5 percent more in another. Even so, the players with the final say handed it over in only about 40 percent of the cases where handing it over paid them. A player who handed it over and was then overruled was less likely to hand it over in the next round, even when it was in that player’s interest.
A decision written on the sheet as the manager’s becomes the manager’s in practice only if you do not reverse it.
Which decisions go at which level?
Billikopf describes five approaches, from the boss who decides and announces it to the boss who commits to accepting whatever the employees decide within prescribed boundaries. The sheet uses four levels, few enough for a manager to remember while a worker waits for an answer.
| 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 for “decides alone” |
| Consults you first | Hears your view, then decides | is costly, hard to undo, or new to the farm |
| Stays with you | Carries out what you decide | ties up the farm for years or puts much of its money at risk |
Billikopf’s guide to who takes part in a decision is that complex decisions require broader involvement, while simple ones can go straight to the employees who have the information. Routine ones, such as tank filling and supply ordering, are handed over permanently through job descriptions. You keep control by narrowing the room the manager has, which on the sheet is the limit next to each “decides alone”.
In January 2027, the owners of a corn and soybean farm in Minnesota sit down with their new manager and place the diesel order on the sheet.
Decisions about land, a combine, permanent hires and selling the crop could go at “stays with you”, as examples and not as a rule. Swapping a worker’s day off could go at “decides and tells you”, and rebuilding a tractor engine at “consults you first”. Where the rest go depends on what a mistake would cost on your farm.
One decision you may want at “decides alone” is stopping the work at a place where someone could get hurt today, without waiting for you. The article on work areas that fall below standard shows how to mark those places on a walk with a written standard, and who answers for the repair.
How do you hand over more without taking it back?
One decision at a time. Billikopf writes that delegation works best in small increments, and that owners sometimes hand over too much and, when the employee fails, take much of it back. He also describes a dairy owner who tested understanding first. The owner evaluated the body condition of one hundred cows, then gave the same list to the herdsman to evaluate from scratch. The two then compared notes cow by cow.
Write next to each decision what has to go well before it moves one level closer to “decides alone”. In the example farm, the condition for the diesel order is three monthly orders within the $5,000 limit.
Answering the question yourself is quicker, which is why it is hard to stop. Iowa State University’s extension service notes that a decision one person makes alone is the fastest and easiest way to decide, but the others do not feel it is theirs. Billikopf adds that delegation takes more time in the short term.
A written spending limit can also read as distrust, depending on when and how you set it. Armin Falk and Michael Kosfeld let one player decide whether to require a minimum amount of work from another. Most of the other players chose less effort when the first player restricted them rather than trusted them. The same minimum set by the rules of the game did not bring that drop. The authors read this as a reaction to being distrusted, not to the minimum itself.
A spending limit is a different kind of limit, and applying the study to it goes beyond what was tested. Write the limit as a rule of the farm, agreed before the situation comes up and the same for the next manager. Do not set it on the spot after a purchase you did not like.
When you disagree with a decision the manager made within what the sheet allows, the decision stands. Billikopf’s advice with a new foreman is that owner and foreman go out together to look at the work, and once away from the workers they can talk. The foreman then gives the crew the feedback, so the crew sees that the foreman has the owner’s support. Change the rule or the level for next time, in private, and write the change on the sheet.
Two things stay off the sheet. Workers who want to complain about the manager need a way to raise a problem that does not go through the manager. And deciding is not the same as holding the keys: who has which key, password and bank login goes on a separate list.
What do you write first, and in how long?
The first draft is the list of questions your crew brought to you or to the manager in the last month. One sheet of paper, one afternoon, and the manager with you before either of you signs.
Date the sheet and sign it together for a plain reason. Iowa State’s extension service tells family businesses to keep minutes because, without them, disagreements may emerge later over what decisions were reached. The sheet does not make the manager decide. That depends on you, each time a worker brings you a question the sheet gives to the manager.
How the decision sheet fits with the rest of running a farm is on the farm management page. Other documents for the people who work with you are in the people section of the Rurivia library.