Sagacious Think

Delegate or dump?  Sometimes its hard to distinguish the two.  Often managers delegate the work they like the least as opposed to strategically assigning it.  In doing so, they’ve dumped the problems on others and walked away – its human nature after all, to avoid doing things we dislike.  But risks exist with simply passing along work without follow through or understanding of what is involved: loosing control of quality and potentially much more.  Here’s what I see as the problem.  Delegation requires some thought before execution and many managers fail to do it, they treat the task more like a hot potato and quickly pass it off and forget about it, until a problem arises that is. First what exactly is delegation:

delegate |ˈdeləˌgāt|verb [ trans.]

entrust (a task or responsibility) to another person, typically one who is less senior than oneself : he delegates routine tasks | the power delegated to him must never be misused.• [ trans. ] send or authorize (someone) to do something as a representative : Edward was delegated to meet new arrivals.

entrust |enˈtrəst|verb [ trans.]

assign the responsibility for doing something to (someone) : I’ve been entrusted with the task of getting him safely back.• put (something) into someone’s care or protection : you persuade people to entrust their savings to you.

No where in this definition is “giving up responsibility”.  I never let any of my managers use the excuse “but I gave it to Joe to do”.  They were all reminded that they were ultimately responsible for the work delivered.  Just because someone is given responsibility for the day to day tasks, does not mean the manager can wipe their hands of it, if that was the case, that middle management layer would not be required. Delegate with Purpose – Align tasks with motivators I recently attended a team building meeting where we reviewed our 5 Dynamics assessment that showed where we found our our energy.  They broke a workstream from inception to completion into 5 areas, that flowed from one to the other:

explore → excite → examine → execute → evaluate

Explore: The stage is where new ideas and perceptions are made  - big picture stuff.

Excite: This stage takes new ideas and builds excitement about them -think team building, marketing.

Examine: This stage  focuses on how the idea can effectively integrate with existing budgets, time tables, and company standards.  Think accountants – in fact the finance folks in our group were off the charts here in terms of energy.  Excel spreadsheets play a big part here.

Execute: This stage is where task oriented focus comes into play – its executing on the ideas developed in the explore phase.

Evaluate: This is where the team reviews the stages – lessons learned. No one scores high in every area.  Even without taking the test, I knew I felt stronger in certain stages and tended to spend more time in those areas.  I also realized that everyone is different.  Not everyone feels the same way, and if, through communication, people can focus on the areas that appeal to them most (Happy solution:  Spending a lot of time staring at an Excel spreadsheet saps my energy.  Imagine my delight when my colleague, a finance guy, said that was something he enjoyed.  We knew who was going to perform the project data analysis – and we were both happy.)  My point with this rather long winded explanation is that instead of simply passing of undesirable projects, ascertaining if there’s a fit based on skills and preferences as this will most likely lead to improved performance.

Do Not Loose Control

My second caveat with delegating is to loose any knowledge of the critical underpinnings of your business – like cash.  A businessman I know, hates dealing with the accounts receivable and accounts payable.  Understandably he would rather focus on the portion of the business he is good at, so he hired a clerk to take care of that.  Funnily enough he developed cash flow issues.  As it turns out, the clerk was skimming money; hundreds of thousands of dollars.  He turned over his entire accounting to another individual and rarely followed up – generally only if there was a complaint from a contractor who was not getting paid.  Along with the daily tasks he gave up his responsibility – something a manager cannot afford.

Suggestions for Good Delegation

• Clearly define the task – Tell the employee what to do, not how to do it.  To me this crosses the line to micromanagement.  Besides, that employee may have a better method than you envisioned.
• Regular follow up – Make sure that both the manager and employee remain aligned with the goals and changing targets.  It never fails, a manager learns new information pertinent to the task in senior level meetings, and she fails to alert the employee to the revised expectations; regular communication should avoid this pitfall.
• Delegate with purpose – If possible assign tasks according to people’s strengths so that the individual is motivated to do a good job
• Avoid delegating what you do not know –  A manager should know her weaknesses – spend time with the employee performing the tasks and ask questions to understand how they arrived at that solution.  Chances are that as the manager was originally charged with the task they will have to explain the results to the next management level.
• Peform a lessons learned – even if everything went well.  This is a great opportunity to understand what about the manager’s communication style is working and what can be improved.  Often assumptions were made that can be clarified for the next task.
• Start small – With new employees, start small until both sides understand the working style of the other, set expectations at the beginning: provide a clear list of deliverables, milestones, resources.  Mangers should consider that employees may not have the same awareness of resources as they do.  This situation is particularly true with the increased number of contract workers.
• Set expectations – Managers should explain what they would like to happen should problems arise i.e an email, a meeting – how should issues be raised.  What happens in an emergency?  Better to have a plan than find out what does happen the hard way.