Delegation – A Critical Leadership Skill

Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht with The Family Business Institute, Digging Deeper.

Today I want to talk about delegation, for any manager or leader delegation is a critically important skill, because if you
can't delegate, you end up doing a lot of low value tasks that take up your time and take up your day and oftentimes those
come at the expense of the more important tasks. So, I read a book quite a while ago, called Time is Money and in that
they talked about doing $100 an hour work, $1,000 an hour work, even $100,000 an hour work. So, that may sound bizarre,
that you could do $100,000 worth of work in an hour. But think about it, if you had a meeting with a client and you secured
a large contract, it could be worth millions of dollars, just that one single meeting.

So, certainly it is possible to do $100,000 an hour work but in order to do that, you have to make sure that you're not
doing the five, 10 and $15 an hour work that you may have within your company. So, the challenge for many people with
this is they give a job ... They have some experience, they've given jobs to people and they come back unsatisfactory and
then they have to do it themselves, or do it over again, or pore over the work that the other person has done, so carefully
that they're really being redundant and doing it again. Another issue is trusting, sometimes folks just have difficulty
trusting others with something, that it'll get done right, or get it done the way they expect it to be done. And therefore,
they have difficulty letting go and end up doing those lower level tasks that they really shouldn't be doing.

And if you had to summarize this problem, the problem comes with something I used to call go-for delegation, go-for
delegation is when you just ask somebody to, "Go for this, go for that, go do this, go do that." And it's rote tasks and go
and get this and do that and the problem with go-for delegation is there's no guidance or purpose to it. So, each time you
ask somebody to go do something for you, they don't learn enough or know enough to catch the nuances or even to do it
on their own the next time, or do it before you ask for it the next time. So, the opposite of this or the answer to your
problem in delegation is something we call stewardship delegation. In stewardship delegation, whoever's helping you or
you're delegating something to, you try to envision or vision the end result together.

This is what I'm looking for. This is what I'm hoping for. And you may think of some rote tasks where that just sounds crazy,
but even on the rote task, for example, if you're asking for copies, do I want them two-sided, stapled, in a booklet? All of
these other things, color black and white, well, there's a million questions. And if the person you're giving it to doesn't
know what you want, you're very unlikely to get what you want. So, envision that end result together and make sure that
they understand what you're looking for, what it's going to be used for, and then they'll have a better chance to deliver
exactly what you want. You have to be able to give responsibility but as importantly is give authority. So, if you give
responsibility with authority, then you find the person you gave the task to is oftentimes unable to complete the task fully
because they don't have the authority to really carry it through to its end point.

So, make sure you're always giving authority with responsibility. The next thing is to make sure you're committing the
resources necessary and I've seen this quite a bit, we give a task, but we don't give a person the time, the credit card, the
money, the budget, the team, whatever they need to actually get it done. And then, of course we're disappointed in the
results and we really should be disappointed in ourselves because we didn't give them what was necessary to get the
result. The next thing is to apply accountability and with that accountability comes coaching. And when I talk about
accountability, you shouldn't think of that as a downward thing, but check in with the person who's doing something for
you, check along the way, make sure they're online with the tasks that you're giving them, the timeline you've given them.
Make sure they're getting a good start.

And that's especially important because if you let a person go down the wrong fork in the road too long, then they've
wasted their time and you won't get your result that you want, or the result in the time that you want. So, you do have to
apply accountability and coaching in your stewardship delegation. You can't just brush your hands and expect it to be
done. And then finally, make sure the consequences are understood and again, I'm not about this in a negative way, but
the consequences might be well, if you, if you bring back this great presentation, we might be able to get the job, or we
might be able to turn the one person on the panel who could vote against us in our favor if we can really knock this one
out of the park, that would be an example of the consequences and knowing them.

And finally, one of the biggest challenges we have in stewardship delegation is trust. You have to be able to trust that
somebody else can do the job otherwise you're doomed to end up doing them all yourself. And that's not what you want
to be more effective, that's not what you want to be able to advance your leadership. You have to be able to delegate and
to do that, you have to be able to give trust to the person that's going to do the job for you. So again, just take a look at
your own self, how well you are delegating, how well or how much that might be helping or inhibiting your growth in
leadership.

So, Digging Deeper, thanks again for tuning in.