Uncategorized

Delegation, what’s in it for me?

A school principal asking why she gets so many text messages from her staff when she is out of the office.   An executive director of a not for profit organization wonders how to help his managers execute better.  An executive wondering why things don’t happen as he expected.   Delegation is the common theme.

 

Delegation is one of the most important skills of a leader to ensure that people are successful at their work, they continue to grow, and you get buy-in to the results of projects.  The question is how you as a leader make sure that this is a successful experience for everyone.

 

Talking of delegation brings up instant reactions in managers; it is faster to do it myself,  if I give it to someone else, I will have to redo it anyway, I have the information and skills already.  This is a great opportunity to ask yourself; are you ready to put your ego aside and give up control.  Are you willing to accept that they will do the job differently, maybe not as well, but perhaps better?

 

Thinking about some simple steps will assist you in getting successful results from delegated projects or tasks.

 

Identify the problem or outcome:  The most important step in delegation is the identification of the problem to be solved, opportunity to be taken, or challenge to be met.    Taking the symptoms back to root cause or clearly defining the outcome to be achieved is both challenging and critical for success.  Fixing only the symptoms guarantees that the problem will pop up again and being unclear on outcomes frequently results in discovering that different opinions exist on what success looks like.  Or that you haven’t considered all the people with interests in the situation.

 

Decide if it should be delegated:  There are great reasons to delegate, but also some situations that involve confidentiality, crisis, or (truly) skill sets.   Look to delegation to create a culture of accountability and ownership and free you to spend more time on the important issues that require your particular skills.

 

Identify who is needed: Once everyone is in agreement on what needs to be done, you need to consider what skills are required and who has those skills.   Is this an opportunity for someone to develop new skills?  Putting new skills to work in a project is one of the best ways to develop people.

 

Be clear on the boundaries: What are the resources required and/or committed? Have you discussed what decision-making authority you are delegating?   What are the important milestones to be met?  Agree up front on what the communication and update requirements are.  You need to give people enough freedom to stretch them while providing the support to make them successful.

 

Ensure ongoing feedback:  Make the time to review progress and provide coaching as the project progresses.

 

Celebrate Success:  Make sure that the people get the public credit for a job well done.  Great delegation means that you help your people be successful and their success creates success for you.

 

Taking the time to prepare yourself and your people through effective delegation practices will ensure a better end result and motivated skilled people as an added bonus.

Strength and Vulnerability

I heard someone pose a challenge about how strong leaders could show vulnerability.  While I couldn’t formulate a response in the moment, my heart told me that strength was a prerequisite for being vulnerable.

 

In order to be a leader, one has to attract followers.  A necessary distinction is between appointed leaders who possess positional or formal power and leaders who generate followership through inspiration and personal or informal power.  We all know the people in an organization that people listen to and follow despite their seeming lack of power in the formal hierarchy.  Given a choice, it is always easier to get things done through personal power rather than positional power.  A generation ago, people defined strong leadership as being able to make tough decisions and get things done, no matter how they did that.  It was “the cost of doing business” or “why we get paid the big bucks”.   More and more, I am hopeful that things are changing now to a model where strength in leadership is about resolving difficult decisions in a manner that takes into account the competing priorities and focuses on the people.  Tough on the problem, easy on the people.  I see more women bringing their authentic personalities to the workplace as well as the impact of the upcoming generations who we have brought up to express themselves and be genuine.

 

But back to vulnerability…   The vulnerability that triggered the discussion was an art performance where the actor, a middle-aged woman stood up naked before her audience and carried on a 75 minute conversation without a script.  I thought back to the times when I had been my most powerful and they were clearly in those moments when I was my authentic self and simply spoke from the heart, also without a script.  In one meeting, I needed an executive committee to commit to genuine action to change the organizational culture around safety.  I told them about a young woman at one workplace who was an aspiring concert pianist and lost several fingers because someone had bypassed the safety interlocks on the machine she was working with.  And watching a father bleeding to death after a forklift accident.  I still can’t talk about those incidents without my skin prickling.  But the impact of me telling that team why it was personally important to me meant that they did go out and lead the cultural change.  And in a corporate world where tears aren’t normal, I needed personal strength to stand up and talk to those people from my heart.  It is perhaps one of the most difficult things for most of us to expose our hearts in a situation where it isn’t common behavior and especially for women where they are still struggling to make their place.

 

I realized that what was missing in the theatre conversation was a common definition of strength.  Perhaps it is time to reclaim the word strength to include the full power of an individual when they are being authentic and vulnerable.

I hate my boss!

1 Comment

I hate my boss!

I was out walking with a friend this week, which is usually a time for broad ranging conversations.  This day, he told me about a student he knows who was frustrated with her boss and ended up telling him to “expletive deleted” and walked out of the room.  And perhaps out of the job.   It got me thinking about the people I have worked with where the relationship got in the way of the goals we were supposed to achieve.

I realized very late in my career that part of my role was actually to make my boss successful.  I still find it interesting that I hadn’t considered that for so long, but perhaps I am not alone in that.  This points to the importance of making sure that personal goals are explicit and aligned to the mission and goals of the organization as I suspect that by focusing on those goals, I (inadvertently) made sure that my boss was successful as well.

Most of us have worked for people whom we didn’t respect, didn’t get along with, and perhaps just didn’t like.  In my day, it would have been a career-limiting move to tell them that openly.  But today’s young managers have been brought up expecting to question authority and not to defer to hierarchy to the extent that we did.

So, how do you make your boss successful and deliver on the organization’s goals, if you don’t have a great relationship with either your line manager or important colleagues?

Clearly there will be different answers in different circumstances and for different people.

The ideal solution will be to build a great relationship but that comes at the expense sometimes of ego, energy, and time.  You have to ask yourself if the relationship is important enough that you are willing to make that investment.   In most close work relationships, the answer will be “yes”.    Unless you plan to quit anyway, or you think the person is leaving, or you can tough it out.    How far you go along this path will, again, be a situational decision; do you want an effective working relationship or do you need a close personal one?

Whole books have been written in this area so I can’t possibly be complete here, but here are some of my top techniques.

Get over yourself and your ego.  If the situation is going to change, it has to start with someone and you are likely the only one that you have control over.

What is your intent?  I ask myself  “What do I want to cause in this?”  Be clear so that you aren’t going in trying to change someone or show them they are wrong.

Consider their readiness and openness to talk.  Think about how this may be different with different cultural backgrounds.  Ask for time to talk privately or have a casual chat after work, depending on where you can both be comfortable.

Be curious.  What is the other person’s interest in the situation?  Do they think there is a problem?  What do they care about?

Be responsible for yourself.  Own your emotions and your reactions.  If you are angry or hurt, understand that it is your choice as to how you react to someone else’s behavior.  I know this is easier to say than it is to do sometimes.

Consider what your responsibility has been in the situation.  We all contribute to the outcome of any situation, despite our best efforts to look like victims.

Bring it back to the impact on work and the organization.  This isn’t about you wanting to be their best friend; it is about how you work together in getting results for the organization.  Don’t tell your boss that you don’t like the way they manage, but you can tell them that you work best when you get clear information on priorities and deadlines about when projects are due.

Remember the good old “I” statements and address the impact that a specific behavior has on you.   “When you answer the phone when we are in a meeting, I feel like you don’t respect me or my time.”  The purist in me wants to make sure that you express an actual feeling or “When you answer the phone when we are in a meeting, I feel hurt because it seems like you don’t respect me or my time”.  You choose based on your and the other person’s openness.

Be resilient.  Don’t expect a full resolution on your first attempt to speak with someone.  Take small steps and you may be surprised at where you get.

Don’t be afraid to get help.  If this is a really important relationship and you don’t think you can do it on your own, have a facilitated discussion.  I had to do this with one important relationship and we reached an understanding about our personal differences that I don’t think we could have on our own as those differences would have barred the path.

If it isn’t working, decide if you can “suck it up” and get through to the end of a contract or until one of you gets transferred.  You can learn something in any situation and hey, I have toughed it out on occasion and ended up as their boss.