Delegating effectively – part 1

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Every manager needs to learn how to delegate effectively to be successful. Martin Zwilling comments that while some people find delegating easy, most of us struggle to get this important management skill right.

He refers to Jan Yager’s time management self-improvement program, Work Less, Do More, discussing ways to improve your delegation skills, including:

  • Choosing what tasks you are willing to delegate and the right person to delegate each one to;
  • Giving clear instructions, including a definite completion date;
  • Delegating responsibility and authority, not just the task;
  • Trusting those to whom you delegate; and
  • Giving public credit when your staff succeed.

Zwilling also suggests you delegate tasks you are not suited to, for example those which require particular technical expertise. Yager writes, “Delegating the right task to the right person at the right time is key to growing your business and increasing your productivity.”

Executive Coach Exchange colleagues rawpixel pixabay

Mind Tools has a terrific article about delegation. They ask, since “Delegation is a win-win when done appropriately…”, why don’t people delegate? They suggest people don’t delegate because it takes a lot of up-front effort. However, “Delegation allows you to make the best use of your time and skills, and it helps other people in the team grow and develop to reach their full potential in the organization.”

They provide a checklist to help you decide when to delegate:

  • Is this a task that someone else can do, or is it critical that you do it yourself?
  • Does the task provide an opportunity to grow and develop another person’s skills?
  • Is this a task that will recur, in a similar form, in the future?
  • Do you have enough time to delegate the job effectively? Time must be available for adequate training, for questions and answers, for opportunities to check progress, and for rework if that is necessary.
  • Is this a task that I should delegate? Tasks critical for long-term success, such as recruiting the right people for your team, genuinely do need your attention.

Once you decide the conditions are right for you to delegate, you need to help your staff member to be successful. For this to happen, your staff member must understand the objectives of the tasks they have been given and be allocated sufficient authority and responsibility to carry them out.

Trust is important but this does not mean ‘set and forget’. As manager, your role should be to undertake regular check-ups to ensure delegated tasks are on track. We recommend setting specific milestones for this, with both times and required outcomes.

Next week we will discuss how to follow up on effective delegation.

Respectful listening

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Executive Coach Exchange Gustav Vigeland
Gustav Vigeland, The Vigeland Installation, Frogner Park

Following on from our recent posts about meetings, this week we are looking at the concept of respectful listening.

A leader in a difficult meeting said, “If I’ve listened carefully, I heard you say…”. Notice how the leader took responsibility for listening carefully to the speaker.

At a basic level, respectful listening involves maintaining focus and avoiding distractions.  Using the time while others are speaking to check emails or hold side conversations does more than distract the speaker and other listeners – it also defeats the purpose of your own presence in the conversation.

Some people see the time when others are speaking as an opportunity to plan their next comment. This means they are not part of the conversation because they are not truly present.

The result is they don’t actually hear what others have to say. Even if they catch the broad message, they will almost certainly miss:

  • the subtle nuances of what others are saying;
  • their implicit messages; and
  • the emotional content.

All these, of course, give powerful clues to what the speakers really care about, what they are worried about and what they really need to win in a negotiation.

To listen respectfully, you need to attend to what people are saying and what they mean. Try using these five steps before you respond with your own comment:

  1. Focus on the person and what they mean.
  2. Concentrate on what lies behind their comments as they speak.
  3. Consider their meaning before replying.
  4. Pause and take a breath before you respond.
  5. Then summarise what you’ve heard to make sure you’ve really understood them.

Associate Professor Will Felps of the University of NSW Business School has carried out research into what he calls ‘respectful inquiry’, which has a strong component of respectful listening and also flows from it.

‘Respectful inquiry…involves asking questions in an open way then listening attentively to the response. “These communication behaviours combine to signal the degree to which someone is encouraged to continue to share his/her thoughts on a subject during a conversation,”‘ he says.

Felps says there are three barriers to a “healthy level of questioning and listening”:

  • simple egotism, or thinking about issues only from one’s own perspective;
  • an old-school model of leadership, based on the idea that the job of a leader is to direct; and
  • ‘threat rigidity’, or “the idea that when we are under stress we lose our will to explore”, which means that the time when respectful inquiry is most essential is also the time it is least likely to be utilised.

Listening respectfully and making respectful inquiry takes time, commitment and practice. It’s a more challenging way to have a conversation because it requires so much more attention. With practice, though, you will find the results far more rewarding, both at a personal and a professional level.

Oh no – not another meeting!

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We’ve all found ourselves in this situation – dreading the boredom of another pointless meeting. Yet, when it’s our turn, we still call people together. If meetings are such a waste of time, why do we keep having them?

And how can you make meetings work for you, now you are the chair?

This is the first post in a series of our top tips for giving your meeting the best chance of success.

Good preparation ensures the best outcomes.

  1. Set a tight agenda

Make sure to set a tight agenda that only contains issues that need to be discussed when the group gets together. This means your items should be important to the organisation, strategic and controversial. They should be items where different views need to be heard.

Executive Coach Exchange meetings bored pixabay pixel-mixer
Oh no. Not another meeting.

Don’t make the meeting longer than it needs to be. Administrivia is a waste of everyone’s time – deal with it another way.

  1. Involve key stakeholders in setting the agenda

Call for agenda items from the group well in advance. If papers are required, ensure the group gets enough time to read and consider them before the meeting. Including items from other people gives them ownership in the meeting’s success. However, you also need to understand why these items have been added so you are not caught out by a hidden agenda.

Go through the minutes of the previous meeting, check the progress of action items and ensure as many tasks as possible have been completed.

Make sure attendees are aware whether the meeting, or individual items, are confidential, before the meeting begins. Don’t be embarrassed to ask for confidentiality acknowledgements for highly sensitive material.

  1. Get the decision-makers in the room

Meetings are about decisions, so you need to get the decision-makers at your meeting. The more important the decision, the more important it is to get the people with the authority to make decisions to attend. Consider what people expect to gain from coming to your meeting.

  1. Dealing with substitutes

If people want to send a substitute, make it clear that decisions will be made and their substitute will be part of those decisions. If people are constantly sending substitutes, they are telling you that your meeting is not important. Ask yourself whether they need to be part of the group at all and, if they are needed, ask them why they are not attending.

  1. Schedule the meetings well in advance and set the mode

To make sure people can attend, fix the dates and venues of your meetings at the beginning of the year and don’t move them. Decide whether people can attend virtually to reduce travel time. If a meeting must be face-to-face for people travelling long distances, make sure the content is worth their while. You can waste a lot of relationship capital by insisting on personal attendance for meetings with routine content.

  1. Set the meeting up properly

Delegate the set up to someone you trust. Make sure the meeting room is properly set-up before the meeting starts. Provide food and drink if the meeting is to go for more than 2 hours or if people have travelled a long way to get there. Without a practical set up, you risk losing engagement.

  1. Controversial items

Talk to people before the meeting as items and papers are being developed and take their concerns on board. Enlist allies to speak in support of your items. Know what objectors will say before they speak. Anticipate questions and address these in your papers. Make sure you know what members will say and, if applicable, how they will vote, before the meeting starts.

Next week – running your meeting.