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Delegation has a variety of benefits and advantages. Delegation allows you to expand your work scope from what you can do to what you can control or manage. That means you can concentrate on doing the few things in the course of your workday that only you can do for your company.
The average person works at 50 percent to 60 percent of capacity. That means that in the average organization, half of the capability of employees is not being tapped. An excellent organization is one in which people are using more and more of their potential capacity to achieve the goals of the organization.
You have two choices in the world of work. When work has been assigned to you and you are accountable to your boss, you can either do it yourself, or you can get someone else to do it. Your ability to get someone else to do the work—or, more precisely, to entrust the work to someone else who can, in fact, do it—lets you focus on the work you have to do. More than anything else, this ability to effectively delegate is going to determine your career track, your rate of promotion, your pay, your status, your position, your prestige, and your success in management.
Very often, managers underestimate the ability of their people. But the only way you can test the true competence of individuals is by giving them more to do than they have ever done before, and then allowing them the latitude to make mistakes and to learn from them.
The natural tendency is to fall back into your comfort zone and start doing rather than delegating. Keep reminding yourself that your job is to manage, not to do it yourself.
You can never know what is going on everywhere all the time. And you don’t need to know. You can always have access to the people who do know and who can bring you up to speed quickly.
Practice the “70 percent rule.” If someone else can do the task 70 percent as well as you, delegate the task to that person. Free yourself up to do those few tasks that only you can do.
Many of the problems in management come from taking action without thinking. By contrast, success in management is usually the result of taking time to think before you act.
Every minute spent in planning saves ten to twelve minutes in execution.
You should approach each job or assignment as if your career and your future depended on it.
Peter Drucker said, “I am not a consultant; I am an insurant. I don’t tell people what to do. I just ask them the hard questions that they need to answer to decide what to do for themselves.”
An important part of delegation is for you to think through the results that you are trying to accomplish, and then to keep people’s attention focused on these results. One of the hallmarks of all successful managers, and all effective people, is an intense results-orientation. One of the hallmarks of ineffective people is that they focus on activities rather than on accomplishments.
When people are unclear or unsure about what you want, they will tend to hold back rather than make a mistake. They will waste their time and spin their wheels. They will spend less time producing and more time socializing and engaging in other low-value or no-value activities.
“The very worst use of time is to do very well what need not be done at all.”
80 percent of the value of what you do will be determined by 20 percent of your activities. In some jobs and positions, it can be that 90 percent of what you do is represented by 10 percent of your work. If you don’t know what the top 10 percent or 20 percent of your activities are, there is no way that you can perform to distinction.
Jim Collins wrote in his book Good to Great, top managers are those who “get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off the bus, and then get the right people in the right seats on the bus.”
Excellent performance motivates; average performance does not. People don’t derive any motivation from doing an average job. If they do a poor job, their self-esteem actually goes down and they become increasingly demotivated. But if they do an excellent job and get recognized for that excellent job, their self-esteem goes up and they are motivated to do an excellent job again and again.
To ascertain how good a manager you are, consider this: How long you can be away from your office without confusion setting in? Many managers are reluctant to take vacations or time off for fear that their staff’s performance will start to crumble as soon as they are away for a couple of days.
“Your success in your business is going to be largely determined by your taking the time to get to know the people who work for you. You need to ask them questions about their lives and listen to the answers.”
The best bosses are those who are absolutely clear about what is to be done, who is to do it, and to what standard.
you will have four different kinds of bosses. The first are those who are low on consideration and low on task clarity. These are bosses who are unclear and indecisive and who make it almost impossible to perform to high standards.
The second quadrant will be bosses who are high on consideration and friendly to work with, but vague and unclear about the tasks or the structure of the work. These bosses are usually ineffective, and their teams perform at low levels. In the next quadrant are the bosses who are task-focused but don’t pay a lot of attention to their people. They seldom ask them questions about their personal lives. This type of a boss will be effective in a highly demanding, fast-changing work environment. But since people are largely emotional, they will eventually become dissatisfied when they feel that
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The third quality of top bosses is that they give considerable freedom to people to do their job as they see fit. Confucius had a saying: “With the best leaders, when the job is done, the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves.’”
Let the employee demonstrate to you over a period of time that he has the capability to manage ever-larger assignments and tasks. Otherwise, less than competent individuals can feel overwhelmed and create far more problems than they solve.
Each of your employees, in every position, should have at least one job that is totally their own.
Let your employees know when they are completely responsible for an important task. Employees demonstrate greater loyalty, commitment, and dedication to the organization when they feel a sense of ownership and personal empowerment.
Remember, there is a direct relationship between conversation and commitment. When employees have access to the boss, they have greater commitment to doing the job right. The more people can discuss the job with their boss, the more they internalize the job and accept ownership for its successful completion.
A big mistake that managers make is to underestimate what employees will require to do the job properly, on time, and on budget. They underestimate the amount of time it will take to complete the job and the dollar costs of the activities necessary to fulfill the responsibility.
Your ability to delegate and then to make sure that the employee does the job is the key determinant of your success as a manager.
The way you use it is simple. You simply say, “If everything is going fine and on schedule, there is no need for you to report to me on a regular basis. Just keep me informed with an occasional e-mail, and other than that, I will leave the job completely to you.”
If someone asks you a lot of questions and comes back to you several times, don’t become impatient. Your impatience will just discourage your employees from asking you questions and getting the answers they need.
The Law of Expectations says: “Whatever you expect, with confidence, becomes your own self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Always express confidence in your people. Say things like, “I know you can do a good job. I have complete faith in you. I believe in you and your abilities.”
Delegating decision making is a powerful motivator, and also a powerful people builder. Use it on every occasion. When your people come to you for a decision, whenever possible, refer the decision back to them. Instead of telling them what to do, you should ask, “What do you think we should do?”
Top-performing people are always thinking in terms of solutions—what they can do to solve the problem, remove the obstacle, and achieve the goal. Average-performing people, on the other hand, are always thinking about who is to blame for the problem, which makes them both angry and ineffective.
When you practice management by wandering around, inspecting and controlling the work in person, you will see very quickly if people are in over their heads and need to be doing more or less to get back into balance. You may find that some people don’t have the ability to do the job as well as you require, or need the assistance of others to do a part of the job for which they are not competent.
Regular feedback is a key form of communication between you and your staff members.
Practice what’s called the “timekeeper” model of management. Just as in the world of sports, where the timekeeper simply tells the players and the audience the time and score, just tell your people the results in sales, productivity, and performance. If they are “behind on points,” they will quickly pick up the pace to get the job done on time.
If your company is doing as well or better than other competing companies, tell your people about it. People like to know that they are working in a successful company, especially in contrast to competitors in the marketplace.
Thomas J. Watson Sr., the founder of IBM, was famous for walking around his plants, factories, and offices carrying a checkbook. Whenever he saw someone doing a good job, he stopped and wrote out a check to that person. It may have been a $5 or $10 check, or more, but the impact of that small act of generosity was tremendous.
effective management requires “personality flexibility.” You have to change your personality and your approach depending on the person you are working with.
The DISC analysis divides people into four different types of personalities, based on where they appear on a graph that has two separate axes. The vertical axis ranges from reserved at the bottom to outgoing at the top.
The Director. The director has high task-orientation and low people-orientation. This person is impatient, achievement-oriented, job-focused, and concerned with getting results.
The Expressive. This is a highly social type, outgoing, friendly, and enthusiastic. These people are generalists, see the big picture, are impatient with details, and like lots of human interaction.
The Relator. The relator is people-oriented, with a low task focus. Sensitive and indecisive, these people place a high emphasis on getting along with others; they like cooperation, teamwork, friendliness, and harmony. Relators require a low-key management style, with lots of friendly, slow-paced interaction and no surprises.
The Thinker. This person has both a high task focus and a low people focus. Thinkers are very concerned about details, precision, and accuracy, and being thorough and correct.
The Free-Reign Style This style, also known as laissez-faire management, occurs when the boss gives complete freedom to staff members to determine their jobs and standards, their work hours, their modes of interaction, and their ways of doing the job.
people are expedient, they will use this freedom in the way most favorable to themselves. Without clear structure and guidance, people working under the laissez-faire manager will waste more and more time on idle chitchat, low-value, no-value activities, and personal or private business. Unless someone steps in to develop clear job descriptions, define key results areas, establish standards of performance, and build an effective team, the company or department can gradually deteriorate and perform at a low level overall.
remember that human resources are the most valuable assets that the company has. Your human resources are central to your company. You have been entrusted with the most precious and valuable asset that your organization has to achieve results.
