Delegation and Supervision (The Brian Tracy Success Library)

Brian Tracy

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814433157
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

When you can delegate and supervise well, you will not believe how efficient and easy managing your team can be.

Managers' performance reviews, their salary increases, and basically their fate within the company in general are judged by the results they deliver, yet those results are usually produced by a team of employees working under them. Thus, the most important and broad-reaching aspect of a manager's job is the ability to delegate and supervise extremely well.

In this book, success expert Brian Tracy reveals time-tested ways any manager can use to boost the performance and productivity of their employees.

In Delegation & Supervision, Tracy shares helpful tips including how to:

• Define work, assign it, and set measurable, targeted standards for performance
• Match skills to job requirements
• Use Management by Objectives to delegate longer-term tasks to trusted team members
• Monitor, control, and keep on top of projects with minimum effort
• Turn delegation into a teaching tool and build the confidence of your staff
• Avoid reverse delegation
• Free up time for higher-level tasks only you can tackle, andmore

When done right, delegation and supervision will allow your employees to learn, grow, and become more capable.

Delegation & Supervision shows you how to impress the higher-ups with all that you and your team accomplished.

ONE

Develop Your Most Valuable Resource

YOUR MOST valuable resources in business are the human resources entrusted to you to get the job done. They are far more valuable than computers or office space. Excellent managers are those who are capable of eliciting the highest quality performance from the people they manage.

Your job as a manager is to get the maximum return on the company’s investment in people. As much as 85 percent of the operating budget of any organization, especially a service business, is spent on salaries and benefits. The question is, “Are you getting the maximum return out of these expenditures?” Delegation is one of the ways to do just that.

The average person works at 50 percent to 60 percent of capacity. That means that in the average organization, half of the capability of employees is not being tapped. An excellent organization is one in which people are using more and more of their potential capacity to achieve the goals of the organization.

Grow Your People

Your job as a manager is to grow people. You are entrusted with the responsibility of taking care of your people and developing them. Only people can be made to increase in value. Computers and other equipment depreciate and eventually become obsolete. People, however, can be made to grow in value, depending on how they are managed and utilized. Delegation is a wonderful tool to challenge your people and cause them to stretch, achieving greater results and making a greater contribution.

Most important of all is how delegation allows you to fulfill your own personal potential. The wonderful discovery is that your potential as a manager or executive is virtually unlimited, provided you are able to unleash the talents and abilities of others by delegating and supervising effectively.

You have two choices in the world of work. When work has been assigned to you and you are accountable to your boss, you can either do it yourself, or you can get someone else to do it. Your ability to get someone else to do the work—or, more precisely, to entrust the work to someone else who can, in fact, do it—lets you focus on the work you have to do. More than anything else, this ability to effectively delegate is going to determine your career track, your rate of promotion, your pay, your status, your position, your prestige, and your success in management.

TWO

Challenge the Myths That Block Effective Delegation

THERE ARE several myths in management that often hold managers back from delegating. They may or may not be true, but they are the mental blocks of the individual manager. You may be aware of some of these myths or blocks and not aware of others. Whenever you see a poor delegator, you will probably see one or more of these myths at work.

MYTH 1: There Is Not Enough Time to Delegate

Sometimes people are so busy and swamped with responsibilities that they think they don’t have enough time to sit down and explain the job to someone else. They just want to get on with it as quickly as possible.

On other occasions, they may delegate the job to another person, but they don’t take enough time to walk the person through the assignment and explain exactly what must be done. They may say something like, “Do this and have it done by such and such a time.” They equate this order-giving with delegation. But it is not. It is abdication.

You’ve probably heard the old saying, “There is never enough time to do it right; but there’s always enough time to do it over.” In poorly managed organizations or work units, there always seems to be time to do it over and correct the mistakes and misunderstandings that were caused by not delegating effectively in the first place.

In reality, there is always enough time to delegate effectively. From now on, stop saying that you don’t have the time to delegate a task clearly. Remember, taking the time to delegate well is the most effective use of your time for getting more and better results.

MYTH 2: The Staff Is Not Competent Enough

Very often, managers underestimate the ability of their people. But the only way you can test the true competence of individuals is by giving them more to do than they have ever done before, and then allowing them the latitude to make mistakes and to learn from them.

People will surprise you. Amazingly enough, your staff members probably have competencies that you have never realized. When you learn to tap into their capabilities, not only will they get more fulfillment from their work, but you will also get a lot more done as a manager, which will help your career.

MYTH 3: If You Want It Done Right, You Have to Do It Yourself

This misunderstanding, carried to its logical conclusion, guarantees failure in management. If you truly believe that you have to do everything yourself—and want to get the work done on time, and to an acceptable standard of quality—you will eventually end up with more and more work, and less and less time. This myth will hold you back and condemn you to continually perform at an operational level, rather than advance in management.

The inability to move from doing the job to managing the job is the biggest reason people fail in management. The natural tendency is to fall back into your comfort zone and start doing rather than delegating. Keep reminding yourself that your job is to manage, not to do it yourself.

MYTH 4: People Will Think You’re Not on Top of Things If You Delegate to Others

Often, executives or managers are selfish. Their egos are tied up in their work. They want other people to think that they are on top of the job and know what’s going on all the time. They therefore refuse to delegate.

However, the opposite is true. You can never know what is going on everywhere all the time. And you don’t need to know. You can always have access to the people who do know and who can bring you up to speed quickly.

MYTH 5: When You Are Good at Something, You Should Do It Yourself

Many people spend months and years developing a skill set that enables them to move up, be promoted, and be assigned a staff to work under them. The trap is that doing this particular job well creates a comfort zone, and you continually strive to get back into the comfort zone of doing an old familiar task.

The rule here is fairly simple. You should delegate whatever you have mastered and can now do easily, and move on to something else. Mastering the task has enabled you to move up, and move on. This task should now be taught and passed on to someone else. You should not be working on tasks that are simple and routine and can be done by someone else.

Practice the “70 percent rule.” If someone else can do the task 70 percent as well as you, delegate the task to that person. Free yourself up to do those few tasks that only you can do.

Our natural tendency is to fall into the habit of doing the jobs that we enjoy, the jobs that got us to where we are today, and then keeping these jobs for ourselves. Instead, you should delegate the tasks that you have mastered so that you can get on to tasks that require greater intelligence, skill, and ability.

THREE

The Starting Point of Delegation

THE STARTING POINT of delegation, like the starting point in all successful management, is for you to take some time to think about the job before you do anything else. Think through exactly what has to be done, by you and by others. A good exercise is for you to write out the objective of a job, especially a complex job, and then make a checklist of every action that must be taken to complete the job on time, and to the required level of quality.

Many of the problems in management come from taking action without thinking. By contrast, success in management is usually the result of taking time to think before you act. And there are few areas where this is more important than in the area of delegation.

Planning Is a Time Saver

There is an old saying, “A stitch in time saves nine.” Every minute spent in planning saves ten to twelve minutes in execution. Make a list of everything that has to be done in the completion of an important task or the achievement of an objective. The more time you take to plan the task before you begin, and to write down every step, the faster you will complete that task when you begin work.

Thinking through the job—what has to be done, when it has to be complete, and to what standard of quality—is the starting point of effective delegation. Unfortunately, many managers delegate first and then think through the job later.

Ask the Right Questions

You should approach each job or assignment as if your career and your future depended on it. The bigger and more important the task, the more seriously you should approach it in the first place. Ask the right questions:

What am I trying to do?

How am I trying to do it?

Could there be a better way?

Start off by thinking about your situation today, where you want to be in the future, and the very best way that you can get there.

Be Your Own Management Consultant

The job of the management consultant is to ask questions about what you are doing and why you are doing it that way. Peter Drucker said, “I am not a consultant; I am an insultant. I don’t tell people what to do. I just ask them the hard questions that they need to answer to decide what to do for themselves.”

An excellent exercise to engage in as a manager is to identify your assumptions, and then test them. What are you assuming to be true? What are you assuming consciously, and what are you assuming unconsciously? And most important, what if your assumptions are not true? What if the ide...