Essential Delegation Skills

Carla L Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780566079443
• eBook ISBN: 9781351939195
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

What do the world's top managers have in common? They've learned the secret of effective delegation and how vital it is to their own success. The successful delegator can double or triple his or her productivity. The non-delegator works frantically, grabs lunches, lugs briefcases, is subjective and generally ineffective. The delegator has time for work and personal life, works effectively and views life clearly. The advantages of delegation are quite simple - you are using other people's brains for your gains. As the axiom goes, you'll be working smarter, not harder. The tips and techniques in this book will help you to: ¢ let go! ¢ give advice without interfering ¢ establish progress reports that keep you informed ¢ manage upward and downward delegation ¢ accomplish more through others.

1
The big switch: learning to delegate

The surest way for an executive to kill himself is to refuse to learn how, and when, and to whom to delegate work.

J.C. Penney

Knowing how much to delegate is a difficult problem for managers. Somewhere along the way the successful manager learns to switch the focus of activity from doing to planning, There is a direct correlation between management position and the amount of time required in planning and in operating. The allocation of time to managerial functions such as planning is not fixed but varies from industry to industry and from one person to another.

Susan and Marge went to work at a local bank directly after leaving school. They entered as clerk/typists. They learned the ropes and worked hard. Each began to advance from clerk to secretary to cashier to account representative. These young women were go-getters. They knew the business better than other clerk/typists. They were good and they knew it. They thrived on challenge and learning. As they moved up their professional ladders, they moved into positions of greater supervisory importance. In the span of a few years each was promoted to senior manager of the bank. No one doubted that Susan was capable. Over the years Susan had acquired a talent for handling the bank's computer programming problems. She worked hard, was thorough and was capable of meeting demands. Yet Marge was obviously star material. Somehow Marge seemed a step ahead of Susan. Susan's staff always delivered their workload in a capable manner, but that was it. They did the job and nothing more. What happened to Susan? Somewhere along the way, Susan was sidetracked. She missed the 'switch'. Because of her history of hard work with the organization, she found it difficult to overcome her superwoman mentality. She was unable to settle for less than what she considered perfect. Susan was a doer, not a delegator. Marge stayed on track and grabbed the 'switch' from doer to delegator.

The higher you advance up the managerial ladder, the less time you should spend doing specific tasks. The higher you advance, the more time you should spend planning and managing. Saxon Tate, managing director of Canada and Dominion Sugar, explains it by saying:

Decisions simply must be made at the lowest possible level for management at the top to maintain its effectiveness. I make few decisions with a time span of less than a year. At one point I made them for as short a time span as one week. I now see that kind of involvement in detail as a luxury no man at the top can afford.

Robert H. Breckenridge, president and chief executive officer of Vitronics Corporation, one of America's fastest-growing companies, recalls once taking over a new job and being told by his boss 'to make sure you are the least busy of all the people associated with you'. Says Breckenridge, 'By this he meant that I should organize myself and the people who worked for me so that I had the least to do on a day-to-day basis, and could spend time thinking about the actual future of the business.'

An old management axiom observes that 80 per cent of the work is done by 20 per cent of the people. Have you experienced days when you felt that 99 per cent of the work was done by one per cent of the people - namely you? By failing to delegate, you are leading an army of one ... and armies of one go nowhere. A great coach doesn't don the boots and shinpads and take the field to mask and tackle. He concentrates on strategy and tactics. The most effective managers are more concept-oriented than task oriented.

Planning is exerting control over the future. You cannot control the future if you are trapped in the present. For those trapped in the present, a key to the future is delegation. Delegation is assigning to others specific tasks and the requisite authority to complete those tasks, with mutually agreed methods for evaluating the completed work. The primary reason that managers fail is the inability to delegate properly. Delegation is a leveraging technique. The successful delegator can double or triple his or her productivity. The non-delegator works frantically, grabs lunches, lugs briefcases, is subjective and generally ineffective. The delegator has time for work and personal life, works effectively and views life objectively. The advantages of delegation for you are quite simple - you are using other people's brains for your gains. As the axiom goes, you learn to work smarter, not harder.

The choice is yours. Are you ready to make the switch?

Are you doing the right job?

How well do you delegate? Are you doing the right job? Could improved delegation make your job more interesting and easier? Many quizzes have been devised to give managers a reading on how they rate as a delegator. The following checklist is representative of most. If your answer is yes to none or only one of the 20 questions, you are doing well as a delegator. If you answer yes to four or more of the questions, there is room for improvement in your delegation skills.

1. Are you a perfectionist? Are you proud of it?
2. Do you take work home regularly?
3. Do you work longer hours than your subordinates?
4. Do you spend too much time doing for others?
5. Do you often wish that you could spend more time with your family?
6. When you return to the office, is your in tray too full?
7. Do you still keep a hand in the job you held before your last promotion?
8. Are you often interrupted with queries or requests?
9. Can you name immediately your top three work goals?
10. Do you spend time on routine details which others could handle?
11. Do you like to keep a finger in every pie?
12. Do you rush to meet deadlines?
13. Are you unable to keep on top of priorities?
14. Do you frequently feel overworked?
15. Is it hard for you to accept ideas offered by others?
16. Do you attract followers rather than leaders?
17. Do you give over-detailed instructions to subordinates?
18. Do you believe higher-level managers should work more?
19. Do you hold daily staff meetings?
20. Do you worry that your employees will show you up?

A top investment banker recently attended a time management seminar. Accurately assessing his delegation problems, he returned to the office determined to make changes. He and his secretary listed every item that had crossed his desk in the last week - phone calls, memos, requests for reports, etc. He noted the relative importance of every item, whether it could have been delegated and, if so, to whom. He then directed all assignable tasks to the appropriate persons with instructions 'to handle the tasks'.

This executive described the reaction as follows:

Some dust was stirred up. There were a lot of discussions, but almost every single delegated task was effectively handled. Many of them were taken care of far better than if I had done them. This changed my whole outlook on the job and has made me far more effective.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 The big switch: learning to delegate
• 2 Stop that thief! The advantages of delegation
• 3 Barriers to delegation
• 4 What to delegate
• 5 What not to delegate
• 6 Planning what to delegate
• 7 Effective goal setting in the delegation process
• 8 Three keys to choosing a delegatee
• 9 Developing people power through delegation
• 10 The delegation meeting
• 11 Letting go
• 12 Responsibility
• 13 The importance of spot checking delegation: an example
• 14 Making it stick: handling reverse delegation
• 15 Handling projects delegated to you
• Index