14
… When Managing Others
‘All careers end in management’ is one of my favourite pearls of worklife wisdom – not least because it's (mostly) true. At some point – whether we like it or not – we'll have to instruct juniors. Either that or we'll stay junior – or a freelancer at best – having to cope with the instruction of others.
Of course, there are those that claim to be ‘happier among the troops than the officers’ – as I used to state. But, certainly for me, I now realize this was not based on my egalitarian convictions. It was due to my inner fear that my authority would be ignored, or disputed, or even laughed at. It was my poor self-beliefs that meant I avoided giving instruction, however I disguised it.
If we want to be productive, therefore, we must learn how to be an effective manager – allowing those beneath us in the hierarchy to work for us rather than against us. Indeed, get management right and we've just multiplied our potential output. Get it wrong, and we'll have to stand and watch others excel while we're chained to the bottom of the hierarchy.
So where to begin? Well, how about with yourself. We need to step through the mirror and look back at ourselves – noticing the impact we have on other people. Too often, insecure or unproductive people are obsessed with the impact others have on them, which renders them incapable of seeing the impact they have on the team they're trying to lead. This was certainly true for me. My early days as a manager – while deputy, then editor, of a specialist financial magazine – were clumsy to say the least. I was a hopeless manager because I was too fearful that my shallow authority would be undermined by those I perceived as more self-assured.
My fear that I lacked authority meant that, ultimately, I relied instead on winning the sympathy of my charges. For those I perceived on my side, this worked – they'd empathize with my complaints about the ‘unreasonable’ pressures being placed upon me from above. And they'd try to help, although my authority was immediately discarded in the process. For those I perceived against me, I'd imagine them plotting, and would occasionally throw tantrums in defence against some perceived slight – sometimes even interpreting their bewildered silence as disdain or even ridicule. Indeed, my paranoid reactions became self-fulfilling in this respect.
The power of delegation
Yet my management of people improved markedly once I'd learnt the power of delegation.
‘Delegation is rooted in the essential purpose of management, which is to produce results through people’, write US business gurus Richard A. Luecke and Perry McIntosh in The Busy Manager's Guide to Delegation (2009).
They see delegation as the tool for being an effective manager yet recognize that true delegation is often resisted by overly busy managers, who they ask to take the following quiz:
- Are you so busy you barely have time to blink … while your reports seem to have lots of breaks when they can chat and goof off?
- Are your tasks pretty much the same as they were before you became a manager?
- Do your managerial colleagues seem less pressed for time than you?
- Is the idea of taking a few days off a dismal joke?
For those answering ‘yes’ to any of the above, as I certainly would have done in my early managerial career, the answer – according to Luecke and McIntosh – is to become a good delegator.
Delegation is not just good for you, it's also good for them – helping your team upgrade their skills and competencies, and giving them the opportunity to showcase the confidence that delegation gives them.
Yet many managers fail to delegate effectively, often blaming their charges for their own incompetence. Indeed, Luecke and McIntosh cite the following classic excuses for poor delegation:
- ‘I can't trust anybody to handle this. I'll look bad if the job isn't done right’
- ‘I can do this better than any of my people’
- ‘I'm responsible for what happens here. I cannot delegate that responsibility’.
Certainly, all the above resonates with me, with the middle one often time-based – i.e. ‘I can do the job in less time than it will take me to instruct someone else’.
Unfortunately, I see the same mistakes being repeated when I now ask my account directors to manage people, so there's clearly something unnatural about the delegation process (not least the fact it can trigger our insecurities).
Yet delegation is an essential ‘managerial competency’ according to Luecke and McIntosh. It's at the heart of what management is all about, they state, so anyone managing anybody needs to become a strong delegator.
Luecke and McIntosh offer five steps to strong delegation (with some thoughts of my own).
Step 1: Determine which tasks to delegate
As expected, they're keen that we delegate as much as possible – including all execution-based work on projects – so we should perhaps think about what shouldn't be delegated. Team selection is perhaps the key one in this respect. As we see in football, the manager's primary role is to enrol the team and select the players. As much as he's tempted, he should stay off the pitch while the game's underway.
Step 2: Identify the right person for the job
We should perhaps stick with the football analogy for a bit, because the manager also determines the positions of his players. This is clearly based on the particular skills of the individuals, and it's his job to observe and calculate those skills to determine where each player will be most useful – obviously looking at it from a team perspective. According to Luecke and McIntosh, we should delegate based on those that can devote the time; are interested in the assignment; understand the background; can handle the job; are reliable; and are ‘ready to grow professionally’.
Step 3: Assign the task
This is an interesting element in the ‘art of delegation’ because too much instruction can backfire – destroying their motivation for the job. Extraordinarily, less is more when it comes to instruction, even on major projects. In most cases, those you delegate to will be keen to demonstrate their abilities (if not, you may be delegating to the wrong person).
It's therefore vital that you allow them the room to do so. Too much instruction and they'll view the task as simply following your orders, which will quickly demotivate them. Instead, why not agree (together) a vision of what the result should look like and leave it to them to calculate how to achieve that goal? In most cases, this will have them fully engaged and determined to succeed. And, in the few cases where it doesn't – well, that teaches you something about their interests and engagement in the tasks you need doing.
Step 4: Monitor progress and provide feedback
Under-instructing them isn’t abandoning them to their fate, however. We should monitor their progress (perhaps at scheduled time points, such as ‘in an hour’ or ‘at the end of the day’) and offer constructive feedback. Again, avoid micro-managing as it will simply deflate them. And try not to be judgemental, especially in the early phases of a task when they may have simply misinterpreted the ‘vision’ for the result.
If coaching is required, this is the point at which it will be revealed, although – again – it should be the minimum to re-establish the vision and ensure they have the tools (mental and physical) for completing the task. However, Luecke and McIntosh are very firm: ‘never take back the monkey’ i.e. allow a frustrated staff member to slide out of the job, something they may do if your ‘monitoring’ is too heavy-handed.
Step 5: Evaluate performance
This is a key moment, although another minefield for a manager who can easily lose a subordinate through clumsy evaluation – and a further classic mistake of my early forays into management. If work arrived that was not what I needed, I used to immediately explode in anger or frustration, as if their ‘incompetence’ was a personal insult to my authority. Even if the work was good, it would trigger insecurities – perhaps that they held my authority in contempt.
But I've improved, I hope. For instance, I've learnt that praise is the most undervalued commodity in any work environment. Praise is great: everyone (at least everyone worth employing) is keen to win praise and is motivated by it. I seek praise from our clients, just as juniors seek praise from those they report to. So we should seek to give it by the bucketload when evaluating the tasks of others.
Even if they did a poor job, any feedback will be better received if we can start with the positives – any positives. Then, if calculating what went wrong, we should be careful to avoid evaluating the work based on our emotions (as I used to). In fact, we should take a constructive approach, say Luecke and McIntosh – basing our evaluation on elements such as time taken, quality, or their work's proximity to the original premise.
They also point out common evaluation mistakes, such as the ‘halo effect’ in which we accept poor work from those that usually produce strong output – something that can also work in reverse (that we're overly-critical of work from those we don't rate). Two other common errors are ‘isolated incident bias’ in which we condemn someone based on one incident, and ‘personal difference bias’ in which we ‘pass’ poor work due to some shared characteristic such as gender or background (something that can also work in reverse).
The task, the ask and the timing
In How to Save an Hour Every Day, Michael Heppell breaks what he calls ‘dazzling delegation’ down into ‘the task, the ask and the timing’. When delegating ‘the task’ it's important, he says, to make sure it's something your nominee wants to do. If not, you may end up having to take it back further down the line – perhaps with a deadline looming. It may help, says Heppell, if you've something (i.e. another task) you can take from them (in order to free up their time).
In ‘the ask’ Heppell focuses on one phrase and one word. The phrase is ‘I need your help’ and the word is ‘because’. People are programmed to help, says Heppell, as long as we can offer good cause regarding why.
Finally, there's the timing, in which Heppell is concerned we pick carefully the moment to delegate. If someone looks stressed or overly busy, it may be worth waiting a day or two. And, while this may seem an obvious point, for those that are poor at delegation, it isn't. As stated, good managers are those that understand the impact they have on others. Therefore, how we delegate is important – and that includes the moment we choose to ask for help.