Chapter 5
Delegating to Get Things Done
IN THIS CHAPTER
Managing through delegation
Debunking delegation myths
Putting delegation to work
Choosing which tasks to delegate
After you grow beyond a one-person shop, the power of your business comes not from your efforts alone, but from the sum of all the efforts of your employees. If you’re responsible for only a few employees, with extraordinary effort, you perhaps can do the work of your entire group if you so desire — and if you want to be a complete stranger to your friends and family. When you’re talking about more than a few employees, you simply can’t do all the work if you tried. Besides, you don’t want to be known as a micromanager who gets too involved in the petty details of running things. And your employees may take less responsibility for their work because you’re always there to do it (or check it) for them. They will be less engaged in their work, and morale will plummet. Why should they bother trying to do their best job if you don’t trust them enough to do it?
Managers — even ones who are also business owners — assign responsibility for completing tasks through delegation. But simply assigning tasks and then walking away isn’t enough. To delegate effectively, you must also give employees authority and ensure that they have the resources necessary to complete tasks effectively. You must also monitor the progress of their employees, if they have direct reports of their own, toward meeting their assigned goals.
Delegating: The Manager’s Best Tool
As a business owner, you’re required to develop skills in many different areas. You need good technical, analytical, and organizational skills, but most important, you also must have good people skills. Of all the people skills, the one skill that can make the greatest difference in your effectiveness is the ability to delegate well. Delegating is the number one management tool, and the inability to delegate well is the leading cause of management failure.
Why do you have a hard time delegating? A variety of possible reasons exist:
- You’re too busy and just don’t have enough time.
- You don’t trust your employees to complete their assignments correctly or on time.
- You’re afraid to let go.
- You’re concerned that you’ll no longer be the center of attention.
- You have no one to delegate to (lack of resources).
- You don’t know how to delegate effectively.
Consider these reasons why you must let go of your preconceptions and inhibitions and start delegating today:
Your success depends on it. Business owners who can successfully manage team members — each of whom has specific responsibilities for a different aspect of the team’s performance — are the ones who enjoy the most success.- You can’t do it all. No matter how great a manager you are, shouldering the entire burden of achieving your goals isn’t in your best interest unless you want to work yourself into an early grave. Besides, wouldn’t it be nice to see what life is like outside the four walls of your office?
- You have to concentrate on the jobs that you can do and your staff can’t. You’re the manager — not a software programmer, truck driver, accounting clerk, or customer service representative. Do your job, and let your employees do theirs.
- Delegation gets workers more involved. When you give employees the responsibility and authority to carry out tasks — whether individually or in teams — they respond by becoming more involved in the day-to-day operations of the organization. Instead of acting like drones with no responsibility or authority, they become vital to the success of the business. And if your employees succeed, you succeed.
Delegation gives you the chance to develop your employees. If you make all the decisions and come up with all the ideas, your employees never learn how to take initiative and see tasks through to successful completion. And if they don’t learn, guess who’s going to get stuck doing everything forever? (Hint: Take a look in the mirror.) In addition, doing everything yourself robs your employees of a golden opportunity to develop their work skills. Today’s employees increasingly report learning and development opportunities as one of the top motivators. (See Chapter 1 in Book 6 for more about employee development.)
Suppose, for example, that you’re running a health care consulting firm. When the firm had only a few employees and sales of $100,000 a year, it was no problem for you to personally bill all your customers, cut checks to vendors, run payroll, and take care of the company’s taxes every April. However, now you’ve grown to 20 employees and sales are at $3 million a year. Face it, you can’t even pretend to do it all — you don’t have enough hours in the day. You now have specialized employees who take care of accounts payable, accounts receivable, and payroll, and you have farmed out the completion of income tax work to a CPA.
Each employee to whom you’ve assigned a specific work function has specialized knowledge and skills in a certain area of expertise. If you’ve made the right hiring decisions (see Book 4, Chapter 1), each employee is a talented and specialized pro in a specific field. Sure, you could personally generate payroll if you had to, but you’ve hired someone to do that job for you. (By the way, your payroll clerk is probably a lot better and quicker at it than you are.)
On the other hand, you’re uniquely qualified to perform numerous responsibilities in your organization. These responsibilities may include developing and monitoring your operations budget, conducting performance appraisals, and helping to plan the overall direction of your company’s acquisitions. The section “Sorting Out What to Delegate and What to Do Yourself,” later in this chapter, suggests which tasks to delegate to your employees and which ones to retain.
Debunking Myths about Delegation
Admit it, you may have many different rationalizations for why you can’t delegate work to your employees. Unfortunately, these reasons have become part of the general folklore of being a manager. And they’re guaranteed to get in the way of your ability to be effective.
You can’t trust your employees to be responsible
If you can’t trust your employees, whom can you trust? Assume that you’re responsible for hiring at least a portion of your staff. Now, forgetting for a moment the ones you didn’t personally hire, you likely went through quite an involved process to recruit your employees (as described in Book 4, Chapter 1). Remember the mountain of résumés you had to sift through and then divide into winners, potential winners, and losers? After hours of sorting and then hours of interviews, you selected the best candidates — the ones with the best skills, qualifications, and experience for the job.
You selected your employees because you thought they were the most talented people available and deserved your trust. Now your job is to give them that trust without strings attached.
You usually reap what you sow. Your staff members are ready, willing, and able to be responsible employees — you just have to give them a chance. Sure, not every employee is going to be able to handle every task you assign. If that’s the case, find out why. Does someone need more training? More time? More practice? Maybe you need to find a task that’s better suited to an employee’s experience or disposition. Or perhaps you simply hired the wrong person for the job. If that’s the case, face up to the fact and fire or reassign the employee before you lose even more time and money. To get responsible employees, you have to give responsibility.
You’ll lose control of a task and its outcome
If you delegate correctly, you don’t lose control of the task or its outcome. You simply lose control of the way the outcome is achieved. Picture a map of the world. How many different ways can a person get from San Francisco to Paris? One? One million? Some ways are quicker than others. Some are more scenic, and others require a substantial resource commitment. Do the differences in these ways make any of them inherently wrong? No.
In business, getting a task done doesn’t mean following only one path. Even for tasks that are spelled out in highly defined steps, you can always leave room for new ways to make a process better. Your job is to describe to your employees the outcomes that you want and then let them decide how to accomplish the tasks. Of course, you need to be available to coach and counsel them so that they can learn from your past experience, if they want, but you need to let go of controlling the how and instead focus on the what and the when.
You’re the only one with all the answers
You’re joking, right? As talented as you may be, unless you’re the only employee, you can’t possibly have the only answer to every question in your organization.
On the other hand, a certain group of people deals with an amazing array of situations every day. The group talks to your customers, your suppliers, and each other — day in and day out. Who are these people? They are your employees.
Your employees have a wealth of experience and knowledge about your business contacts and the intimate, day-to-day workings of the organization. They are often closer to the customers and problems of the company than you are. They’ve seen things you haven’t. To ignore their suggestions and advice is not only disrespectful, but also shortsighted and foolish. Don’t ignore this resource. You’re already paying for it, so use it.
You can do the work faster by yourself
You may think that you’re completing tasks faster when you do them than when you assign them to others, but this belief is merely an illusion. Yes, discussing a task and assigning it to one of your employees may require more of your time when you first delegate that task, but if you delegate well, you’ll spend significantly less time the next time you delegate that same task.
What else happens when you do it yourself instead of delegating it? When you do the task yourself, you’re forever doomed to doing the task — again and again and again. When you teach someone else to do the task and then assign that person the responsibility for completing it, you may never have to do it again. Your employee may even come to do it faster than you can. Who knows? That employee may actually improve the way that you’ve always done it, perhaps reducing costs or increasing customer satisfaction.
Delegation dilutes your authority
Delegation does the exact opposite of what this myth says — it actually extends your authority. You’re only one person, and you can do only so much by yourself. Now imagine all 5, 10, 20, or 100 members of your team working toward your common goals. You still set the goals and the timetables for reaching them, but each employee chooses her own way of getting there.
Do you have less authority because you delegate a task and transfer authority to an employee to carry out the task? Clearly, the answer is no. What do you lose in this transaction? Nothing! Your authority is extended, not diminished. The more authority you give to employees, the better able your employees are to do the jobs you hired them to do.
As you grant others authority, you gain an efficient and effective workforce — employees who are truly empowered, feel excited by their jobs, and work as team players. You also gain the ability to concentrate on the issues that deserve your undivided attention.
You relinquish the credit for doing a good job
Letting go of this belief is one of the biggest difficulties in the transition from being a doer to being a manager of doers. When you’re a doer, you’re rewarded for writing a great report, developing an incredible market analysis, or programming an amazing piece of computer code. When you’re a manager, the focus of your job shifts to your performance in reaching an overall company or project goal through the efforts of others. The skills required are quite different, and your success is a result of the indirect efforts of others and your behind-the-scenes support.
Wise managers know that when their employees shine, they shine, too. The more you delegate, the more opportunities you give your employees to shine. Give your workers the opportunity to do important work — and do it well. And when they do well, make sure you tell everyone about it. If you give your employees credit for their successes publicly and often, they’ll more likely want to do a good job for you on future assignments. Don’t forget, when you own a business that employs others, your business’s success is primarily measured on your employees’ performance, not what you’re personally able to accomplish.
Delegation decreases your flexibility
When you do everything yourself, you have complete control over the progress and completion of tasks, right? Wrong! How can you, when you’re balancing multiple priorities at the same time and dealing with the inevitable crisis (or two or three) of the day? Being flexible is pretty tough when you’re doing everything yourself. Concentrating on more than one task at a time is impossible. While you’re concentrating on that one task, you put all your other tasks on hold. Flexibility? Not!
The more people you delegate to, the more flexible you can be. As your employees take care of the day-to-day tasks necessary to keep your business running, you’re free to deal with those surprise problems and opportunities that always seem to pop up at the last minute.
Taking the Six Steps to Delegate
Delegation can be scary, at least at first. But as with anything else, the more you do it, the less scary it gets. When you delegate, you’re putting your trust in another individual. If that individual fails, you’re ultimately responsible — regardless of whom you give the task to. When you delegate tasks, you don’t automatically abdicate your responsibility for their successful completion.
As a part of this process, you need to understand your employees’ strengths and weaknesses. For example, you probably aren’t going to delegate a huge task to someone who has been on the job for only a few days. As with any other task that you perform as a manager, you have to work at delegating — and keep working at it. Ultimately, delegation benefits both workers and managers when you do it correctly.
Follow these six steps for effectively delegating:
Communicate the task.
Describe exactly what you want done, when you want it done, and what end results you expect. Ask for any questions your employee might have.
Furnish context for the task.
Explain why the task needs to be done, its importance in the overall scheme of things, and possible complications that may arise during its performance.
Determine standards.
Agree on the standards you plan to use to measure the success of a task’s completion. Make these standards realistic and attainable.
Grant authority.
You must grant employees the authority to complete the task without constant roadblocks or standoffs with other employees.
Provide support.
Determine the resources necessary for your employee to complete the task, and then provide them. Successfully completing a task may require money, training, or the ability to check with you about progress or obstacles as they arise.
Get commitment.
Make sure your employee has accepted the assignment. Confirm your expectations and your employee’s understanding of and commitment to completing the task.
Sorting Out What to Delegate and What to Do Yourself
In theory, you can delegate anything you’re responsible for to your employees. Of course, if you delegate all your duties, what are you going to do? The point is, there are some things you are better able to do, and some things your employees are better able to do. As a result, some tasks you make an effort to delegate to your employees and other tasks you retain for yourself.
When you delegate, begin with simple tasks that don’t substantially impact the business if they aren’t completed on time or within budget. As your employees gain confidence and experience, delegate higher-level tasks. Carefully assess the level of your employees’ expertise and assign tasks that meet or slightly exceed that level. Set schedules for completion and then monitor your employees’ performance against them. This is a good opportunity to see if an employee isn’t being challenged or is bored. When you get the hang of it, you’ll find that you have nothing to be afraid of when you delegate.
Pointing out appropriate tasks for delegation
Certain tasks naturally lend themselves to being delegated. Take every opportunity to delegate the following kinds of work to your employees.
Detail work
As a business owner, you have no greater time-waster than getting caught up in details — you know, tasks such as double-checking pages, spending days troubleshooting a block of computer code, or personally auditing your employees’ timesheets. The Pareto Principle holds that 20 percent of the results come from 80 percent of the work. You can no doubt run circles around almost anyone on those detailed technical tasks that you used to do all the time.
But when you’re the owner, your duty is to orchestrate the workings of a team toward a common goal — not just to perform an individual task. So leave the details to your employees, but hold them accountable for the results. Concentrate your efforts on tasks that have the greatest payoff and that allow you to most effectively leverage the work of all your employees.
Information gathering
Browsing the web for information about your competitors, spending hours poring over issues of Fortune magazine, and moving into your local library’s reference stacks for weeks on end isn’t an effective use of your time. Still, many business owners can get sucked into the trap. Not only is reading newspapers, reports, books, magazines, and the like fun, but it also gives you an easy way to postpone the more difficult tasks of managing your company. Your responsibility is to look at the big picture — to gather a variety of inputs and make sense of them. You can work so much more efficiently when someone else gathers needed information, freeing you to take the time you need to analyze the inputs and devise solutions to your problems.
Repetitive assignments
What a great way to get routine tasks done: Assign them to your employees. Many of the jobs in your company arise again and again; checking inventory levels and placing orders for more product, reviewing your biweekly report of expenditures versus budget, and approving your monthly phone bill are just a few examples. Your time is much too important to waste on routine tasks that you mastered years ago.
If you find yourself involved in repetitive assignments, first take a close look at their particulars. How often do the assignments recur? Can you anticipate the assignments in sufficient time to allow an employee to successfully complete them? What do you have to do to train your employees in completing the tasks? When you figure all of this out, develop a schedule and make assignments to your employees.
Surrogate roles
Do you feel that you have to be everywhere all the time? Well, you certainly can’t be everywhere all the time — and you shouldn’t even try. Every day, your employees have numerous opportunities to fill in for you. Presentations, conference calls, client visits, and meetings are just a few examples. In some cases, you may be required to attend. However, in many other cases, whether you attend personally or send someone to take your place really doesn’t matter.
The next time someone calls a meeting and requests your attendance, send one of your employees to attend in your place. This simple act benefits you in several different ways. Not only do you have an extra hour or two in your schedule, but also your employee can present you with only the important outcomes of the meeting. In any case, your employee has the opportunity to take on some new responsibilities, and you have the opportunity to spend the time you need on your most important tasks. Your employee may even discover something new in the process.
Future duties
As a business owner, you must always be on the lookout for opportunities to train your staff in their future job responsibilities. For example, one of your key duties may be to develop your annual budget. By allowing one or more of your employees to assist you — perhaps in gathering basic market or research data, or analyzing trends in previous-year budgets — you can give your employees a taste of what goes into putting together a budget.
Don’t fall into the trap of believing that the only way to train your employees is to sign them up for an expensive class taught by someone with a slick color brochure who knows nothing about your business. Opportunities to train your employees abound within your own business. An estimated 90 percent of all development occurs on the job. Not only is this training free, but also by assigning your employees to progressively more important tasks, you build their self-confidence and help pave their way to progress in the organization. (See Chapter 1 in Book 6 for more about employee development.)
Knowing what tasks should stay with you
Some tasks are part and parcel of the job of being the owner. By delegating the following work, you fail to perform your basic management duties.
Long-term vision and goals
Your position at the top provides you with a unique perspective on the organization’s needs. One of the key functions of management is vision. Although employees at any level can give you input and make suggestions that help shape your perspectives, developing the business’s long-term vision and goals is up to you. Employees can’t collectively decide the direction in which you should move. An organization is much more effective when everyone moves together in the same direction.
Positive performance feedback
Rewarding and recognizing employees when they do good work is an important job for every manager. If this task is delegated to lower-level employees, however, the workers who receive it won’t value the recognition as much as if it came from the owner. The impact of the recognition is therefore significantly lessened.
Performance appraisals, discipline, and counseling
In a busy small business, a strong relationship between owner and employee is often hard to come by. Most owners are probably lucky to get off a quick “Good morning” or “Good night” between the hustle and bustle of a typical workday. Given everyone’s hectic schedules, you may have times when you don’t talk to one or more of your employees for days at a time.
However, sometimes you absolutely have to set time aside for your employees. When you discipline and counsel your employees, you’re giving them the kind of input that only you can provide. You set the goals for your employees, and you set the standards by which you measure their progress. Inevitably, you decide whether your employees have reached the marks you’ve set or whether they’ve fallen short. You can’t delegate away this task effectively — everyone loses as a result.
Politically sensitive situations
Some situations are just too politically sensitive to assign to your employees. For example, say you’re auditing the expenses for your business. The results of your review show that someone has gone to way too many lunches on company funds. Do you assign a worker the responsibility of reporting this explosive situation? No! You’re in the best position to deal with this information.
Not only do such situations demand your utmost attention and expertise, but placing your employee in the middle of the line of fire in a potentially explosive situation is also unfair. Being the owner may be tough sometimes, but you’re paid to make the difficult decisions and to take the political heat that your work generates.
Confidential or sensitive circumstances
You’re privy to information that your staff isn’t, such as wage and salary figures, proprietary data, and personnel assessments. Releasing this information to the wrong individuals can be damaging to a business. For example, salary information should remain confidential. Similarly, if your competitors get their hands on some secret process that your company has spent countless hours and money to develop, the impact on your organization and employees can be devastating. Unless your staff has a compelling need to know, retain assignments involving these types of information.