Delegate to Accelerate Lesson 1: When (and When Not) to Delegate
Do you want to learn how to delegate so that you can accelerate your business and life? Well, this is the place to be!
This first “Delegate to Accelerate” recording addresses key elements of delegation, including…
what delegation is… and what it isn’t
what to delegate… and what not to
my own “Delegate to Accelerate” journey
the “Delegate to Accelerate” journeys of two of my clients
Listen in to the below recording to learn more and to bring yourself that much closer to true acceleration!
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Full audio transcript
00:01 Hey, it's Naphtali Hoff. I am so excited that you are with me and really thrilled to have the ability to share some awesome content today that's going to be in many ways a preview of the "Delegate to Accelerate" Masterclass. It's important for us to really start to understand what delegation is. A lot of different aspects because there have been so many questions. So much interest in the topic. Of course we can't get to everything and in this short recording or at least relative short recording. We're not going to get to all that much. But I think we're going to cover enough to give you a feel for what delegation is all about, what are the key components involved and how do we do it in a way that really makes a difference in a sustainable sense? Because so often we hit walls, we get stuck, we hit up against obstacles and we know fundamentally we should be doing this stuff, but we don't really take the time to work it through.
01:04 And as a result, like most things in life that we don't do well or we get some resistance about, we stop doing it. And once we stop doing it, we're back to where we were before. And sometimes we're even worse off than we were originally. So I think it's critical for us to try to unpack the concept of delegation. And before we get into the specifics, I just wanted to share with you a little bit of who I am and how I can be helpful and all that good stuff. And then of course we're going to dive deeply into one element, which today, for this particular recording, which is "Delegate to Accelerate, Number One," we're going to focus on "when." In other words, when is it appropriate for somebody to be delegating and when should they not be delegating? What are some of the specifics around that question?
01:53 So, a little bit about me there. You see a beautiful mugshot over there. I'm a former educator and educational leader. I became an executive coach a number of years ago and I work with my clients to help them in areas of productivity, as I'll get to in a moment. I also consult. I'm an author of "Becoming the New Boss: The New Leader's Guide to Sustained Success." And I've written a number of eBooks as well, tons of blog posts and articles I present and am a keynote speaker at a number of different venues. And when I have a few minutes of free time, I am a part-time gardener. I love my garden and it definitely keeps me connected with nature, connected with God, connected with so many things that I value and love to be able to put my hands into the soil and create something with proper support that I can be proud of.
02:43 So, what is it that I do? Well, what I do most and what I am most proud of is to help leaders as follows. Most leaders struggle to manage their workloads and get home at a decent hour. We're all so busy, we have so much going on. It could be really difficult for us to get out of the office, spend meaningful time with our loved ones, et cetera. So I help them delegate, be more productive, so they could scale profits with less stress and, of course, spend more quality time with the people that you want to be with out of the office. So, that's a little bit about me. And how did I get there? Well, beforehand you could see here this is pretty much an image of every client, more or less, that shows up at my door that wants some help and support.
03:29 We all feel overwhelmed. We got papers everywhere and we just don't know where to turn and how to somehow cross off things in that to do list and begin to clear our desks. Now when I ask people about delegation, I get a lot of complaints. People talk about how it's just they'd love to do it, but they just feel that they can't. And they share a lot of reasons for that. I'd like to list some of the primary ones that I hear all the time. Number one, it takes too long, so I just do it myself. Number two, I don't have the right people on staff to task things to. They just don't feel that they have competent, capable people or frankly anybody that they could be delegating to. Number three, if I don't have trust in my people to do things the right way, how can I delegate to them? And basically what that means is that they want to control the process and the outcome and they want it to be exactly the way that they would do it. And of course who can trust that others are going to do it exactly the way that they would? So they don't delegate.
04:34 Number four, it's a matter of control. I need to have my stamp on everything and I'm not going to do that if I delegate it to others. Number five, I just don't know the process. How do I delegate? What do I delegate? To whom do I delegate? All of these are important questions and actually all these things we unpack in the Masterclass. Number six, I've had a hard enough time doing my own work, or I have a hard enough time doing my own work, let alone supervising others. And this is a problem that most leaders grapple with. We're just so overwhelmed with our own work. Who has time to really help anybody else supervise them and ensure that things get done. And if I can't give it over to someone and just trust completely that they're going to take the project over and complete it without difficulty, without questions, without delays and all these kinds of things, it's just not worth it.
05:33 Number seven, another important one. We don't want to ruffle any feathers, and many of us feel that our people resent being asked. They feel like we're dumping on them, we're piling on them and we should just be doing it ourselves. Number eight, they won't take the job seriously. They don't value what needs to be done as much as I do because the buck stops with me. It does not stop with them. So if they don't value the work, they're not going to put in the effort. And finally, sometimes they feel that the job, the work is just boring. It's not exciting. It's not engaging. So I'll just do it myself. I'm not going to ask anyone else to do it for me. And taken apart, they sound like justifications. There's logic to it, obviously. These are real issues for people. These are reasons we don't delegate.
06:23 And you know, I, I've experienced it myself. I'm not saying that these are not valid. They certainly are. But at the same time, we know that if we want a different outcome, we need a different approach because if we continue to do the same things we've been doing until now, we can't expect different results. And this is all about getting different results so that we can have a change in our lives for the better. We can be more comfortable. We can be more relaxed. We can be less stressed. And positively we could be scaling. Scaling productivity. Scaling output. Scaling profits. Because we are positioning the right people to do the right work. And we are actually scaling empowerment and motivation, engagement, all of these things that we want our coworkers and our team members to feel more of because these are important. They drive productivity and they drive successful business or organizational function or outcome.
07:19 So, these excuses are real, but they are excuses and we have to figure out ways by which to get past them. Now, before I get into the specific responses, I just want everyone to understand that I have my own story. I was a school leader of a 360 students, plus a sizable staff. We had a number of challenges. And when I started as head of school with these limited resources, we didn't have the manpower as an administration to do the things that so many other peer schools were doing. And we felt because we were competing in the marketplace, because we had certain perceptions that we were trying to change, in terms of the academic program, the rigor, the overall quality of the program, et cetera. We felt a tremendous pressure to try to get more done with less.
08:17 So just a few examples. We had no admissions director or marketing professional. There wasn't a resource room, let alone anyone to staff at. We only had computer instruction in the youngest grades and it was taught by our librarian. All of our athletics coaches were volunteers and they drove the buses. I mean, we're talking about very much a shoestring budget. And this was at the the back end, but still very much when we felt the impact of the Great Recession. So there was a lot of challenges at play. And we knew that if we were going to get to meet our goals, we had to change our approach. And I in particular started to think about how could I delegate and empower some of the people we already had that we were already paying, but do so in a way that made better utilization of their time, engage them at a higher level, and removed some of these functions from the administration so that we could shift our energies to other places that were even more critical.
09:23 So in this particular case, we enter in to the world of Laurie. Because as I said before, we're all stressed out. We needed someone who could help. She is a wonderful individual who is really the glue of the office. She served as my personal secretary. She managed other secretaries and members of staff. She handled a lot of responsibility. But I felt that she, with her personality, with their marketing background, which actually had not been tapped into much at all, we could get a lot more out of her and a lot more of a higher quality work. We could always replace the secretarial function she was managing with somebody else and at a lower price point. But we needed her to step in to provide some of the critical pieces, particularly on the front end of admissions as well as marketing. Because one of my assistant heads of school was also the de facto admissions director.
10:23 And that wasn't a good strategy. We really had nobody in marketing in a community where marketing was taken very seriously and PR and all of that were very important. And we couldn't rely on a fly by night approach any longer in order to make this work. So as I gave it more thought than I talked to discuss it with the administration and I said, why don't we consider Laurie in this capacity? There was real agreement around it. And so what we did was, I sat her down. We had a conversation. I offered her a slight raise in salary. But I offered her a real increase in meaningful work for her. And she was so grateful. She was so gratified to get work that she was really excited about, that engaged her and motivated her, gave her new opportunity, gave her new responsibility, and created a whole different dynamic for the office,
11:20 for her, for public public relations to the community. We now had a real admissions process. It was still a lot for one person to handle. We had to support Laurie as well. But it created a whole different approach to how we handled some of these critical pieces. And we started to feel, I started to feel for sure, less stressed about these important components because I knew that we at least had begun the process of improving our situation. So over time it wasn't this one and done type experience. I used delegation quite a bit. Whether it was to manage my calendar or to provide more oversight and feedback to teachers whose classrooms I would visit, to Institute programming in particular a school-wide student behavioral program, to upgrade our technology both in the computer lab and in classrooms. Just in general, the way that we were able to communicate with and interact with our constituents and to increase my interface with donors.
12:21 These are all very important pieces. And for me to be able to delegate elements of it, usually back-end stuff, I would still be the front facing representative, if you will, of the school both internally and externally, but having people, whether it was committees or individuals or small groups that were tasked to specific responsibility, research, communication, soliciting proposals, these kinds of things, that allowed me to do the work I really needed to be doing, which was getting into classrooms, interfacing with key constituents, really being the voice and the guide, the leader of the school. And it's very hard to do that when you feel like you're constantly being weighed down by task and responsibility. So that's kind of my delegation experience. And I'd like to briefly share with you two other experiences of the many individuals that I've helped.
13:19 One of them is David and the other is Pearl. David is a small business owner, lives in the greater New York City area. And this is a person without getting into the specifics, the kind of work that he was involved with demanded a lot of oversight of process. And he was working like crazy. He needed to oversee everything. He was never not taking vacation. He was not spending meaningful time with family. And it was something he felt, you know, he felt that he really needed a change in his life. And in our conversations we also recognized that if he wasn't going to delegate, he was never going to scale because he was going to be so busy doing the day to day grunt work, let's call it, that he wouldn't have the ability to be meeting with the right people, to be selling the business and creating new relationships that would ultimately give him the right kind of client so that he wasn't just pursuing, let's say, you know, nickel and dime type business.
14:17 But he was pursuing real serious business because he had the time to meet the right people, whether in his case lawyers or landlords or other people in the real estate and rental management space that was specific to what he did. He needed to be meeting these people. He needed to be introducing his work to these people and he couldn't do it if he's spending all this time in the office. So we talked about repositioning existing personnel to be able to utilize their talents more effectively, to hire and onboard a manager that was over going to oversee the process. Basically to become a replacement for David so that David could be out there meeting and selling. And that mindset alone was transformative for him and really helped to change the way that he approaches business and ultimately to scale his business. In Pearls' case, Pearl is a school principal.
15:10 And she heard a talk of mine on the topic of delegation and she was really at her wit's end. I mean, she was many years on the job, very experienced. Beloved. But after so many years, she still could not find a way to get home at a decent hour. I mean, we'd call that the Burnout Freeway and she was on it. I mean, she said to me multiple times, if we can't figure out or I can't figure out a solution to get her off of this hamster wheel, she was just going to quit because it was getting to her to that degree. So we truly try to break it down for. We started with a task analysis. I asked Pearl to tell me all the things she was responsible for or that she saw herself as responsible for or the things she was already doing and try to figure out of all of those tasks, which are the ones that you specifically needed to be doing and which are the ones that you could be tasking to others.
16:06 And in fact delegating to others. And once we had that list, we began the process of asking are there people internally, already on the school payroll that could assume some other responsibility? And the answer was yes. And again with some incentives as well as some empowerment. Pearl began the process of shifting many of those responsibilities to these other individuals. And the result was really positive. She was rejuvenated. She was relieved. She really felt like a new person. And for me as a coach, it was so gratifying to feel like we were making such a difference. And that's what I'm really hoping that our conversations and these mini series and then of course hopefully beyond as well, are going to provide for you in any capacity where you could use more delegation to accelerate your business, your life, everything that's important to you.
16:59 So here's some common questions we've already touched on them, but I want to mention them again because I feel that if we get the questions up front, we can start to ask ourselves, well, what are some solutions that are gonna drive us to a better place? Is it really worth it to get to delegate? It takes so much time and that's a real important thing for many people. Time is so valuable to us and how can I give a few hours or more to really train somebody well? Another question. How can I possibly let go? I'm a control freak, right? It's something that I am on top of. We discussed this, what kind of work should be delegated and what should it all right, I don't know if I should be delegating my core responsibility or maybe just a little piece here or there. How exactly should I approach that?
17:46 The next one is it fair? Maybe I should be doing it myself. The one after that. Who is the right person to delegate to? What if that person doesn't exist right now? How do I find them and certainly how do I train them? How do I keep people focused and motivated while still focusing on my own work? And finally, how can I trust and this is how we began. How can I trust that the work will get done and correctly without a ton of oversight because I still need to be doing my work. I can't be watching this other person or other people being over their shoulder all the time. So how are we going to make this work? These are common questions and they deserve answers. So we're going to jump into that soon. But before I tell you what some answers are, I would just want to tell you how I began my own journey of figuring these things out.
18:35 Number one, I recognized that I could not succeed otherwise. If I wasn't going to figure out a solution, I was going to be like Pearl on the Burnout Freeway. Just you can only give so much before you start to peter out. The next one for me was to begin with some easy wins. I started to think of some small solutions that I could accomplish that would move me in the right general direction. We'd go through a bunch of them now if I could, but you just have to trust that that's the specifics. Whether it was a maintenance issue or something related to teacher payroll or something related to technology or communication. Many of them were not big jobs, but delegating them and then seeing them to fruition made me and others feel like we were starting to gain some momentum here.
19:24 I began to master the process and then I wanted to go further with it because ultimately I wanted to be an effective coach and consultant. I went back to school after pursuing two master's degrees and went back to school for a PsyD, specifically in human and organizational development, also known as IO. And I've since taught this methodology to audiences all throughout the world, both in person, webinar, talks, and of course through my writing. And I've written many, many blog posts as well as chapters in my book, specific to delegation and productivity. So that's how it all started to come together for me. And now I hope that you are ready to get started so that we could become a more effective delegators. So let's define the term because this is important. Oftentimes we think that everything that I'm moving onto somebody else's delegation. But it really isn't.
20:16 And I think that this definition on the left side here is an important one for us to keep in mind as we consider our conversation moving forward. Delegation is the shifting of authority and responsibility for particular functions, tasks or decisions from one person, usually a leader or manager to another. So it's a shift of authority and responsibility. So I'm giving you power and I'm giving you responsibility to act on that power in order, fulfill particular jobs, functions, tasks, decisions, et cetera. But let's understand also what it isn't. Because that's important. It's not dumping and it's not abdicating. So it's not, here's a job, good luck with it. I don't want to deal with it. It's not something that I enjoy, so I'm giving it to you. That's not what delegation is. It's also not just telling people what to do. We would call that directing.
21:11 We want to get to a point where we have people who have competency, they have efficacy, they have knowledge and understanding of what needs to get done. They just need some basic guidance and direction from us as well as oversight to ensure that it gets done and gets done in the proper way. So hopefully that that definition makes sense. Of course, we'll go deeper with it over time. But now that we understand what it is, now let's go back to our original question, which is the question of when. When should I delegate and when should I not delegate? Because what I ultimately determine with when is going to guide many of the other questions. Let's stay on the left side for now. Things I want to delegate. Number one, when there's a lot of work which if you've joined me on this call, you probably feel as always the case are pretty typical of your environment.
22:04 The next one when you feel someone else has a particular skill or qualification that would suit a task. Now this is a little bit different than what we've discussed before though it does tie in nicely to our description of Laurie. Laurie had some skills that were being underutilized and she was a great fit for what we were looking to do specifically in admissions and in marketing and PR. I wasn't only because she had those skills. We obviously needed someone to do it, so it was a good confluence between the two. But definitely if you have somebody who is skilled in that area, think about what are their unique talents and skills and then determine how can you go ahead and create a nexus between need and skill / ability. The next one when someone expressed an interest and I actually just released a blog post and publish on SmartBrief and my own blog as well on the idea of building a delegation culture. And a delegation.
23:01 culture in part means that you empower people to ask you for opportunity to take on responsibility. So if somebody expressed an interest in a task, they want to be part of this. Let's go back to the example before about the student behavior program. They want to improve student behavior. They want to contribute to that conversation. So let them, if they're the right person, join your committee in that example. And then the last one, when you think that a particular member might benefit from the responsibility. So you want them to grow and you want to grow leaders in your institution, company, organization., You want to create a leadership pipeline, which again is so important. We don't want to be short on leaders. We want to do the opposite. We want to have leaders everywhere. Obviously everyone needs to know their role and how it all comes together.
23:49 But you don't want just a group of followers. You want people who are going to take the bull by the horns, who are going to initiate, who are going to problem solve, are going to be difference makers for you and for them. So that's all on the side of when you should delegate. We'll quickly touch on some non-delegation situations. Number one, your own hot potatoes. So if something is extremely important with serious consequences, you need to be directly involved. You can't pass that onto somebody else. If something is usually your specified responsibility. So as a head of school, I had certain things that I uniquely needed to do, interactions with others, presenting the school to the community, signing off on the academic program. All of these kinds of things. If you're the CEO of a company, if you're the manager of a particular team, if you're the head of a nonprofit, there are things that you are uniquely tasked or capable of doing as well as uniquely responsible.
24:47 It's in your job description. It's part of what needs to happen from you and by you that cannot be delegated to somebody else. Though you can ask for help in certain aspects of it. So if it's a matter of, for example, of communicating to constituents, you could have somebody help you with crafting the message, but you ultimately need to be delivering the message. That would be just an example. Things you typically wouldn't do is not usually a good idea to pass onto others. Now, I'm not talking about things like washing the floor. You obviously hire janitorial staff. You obviously hire people to do repairs. You hire people to do food service. Other things you may not typically do. But you still don't want to be asking people things that are let's call it so unpleasant in terms of the office type environment in which you operate, that they're not going to want to do it.
25:38 And they're gonna just resent the ask. And finally, don't delegate tasks to a member who doesn't have the skills. If they're not up to it, don't just give it to them and hope that they're going to figure it out. You have to minimally give them the tools to do it. And we're going to talk about that at a later point. So here's an example of what's called a Must-Should-Could Pyramid. And you'll notice it's a pyramid because the items at the top are typically fewer. The items at the bottom are much more significant. On the left side is the framework. On the right set are some examples. So it moves from what the leader must do all the way down to what others must do. And in the middle you've got the two Shoulds and in the center you have the Could.
26:21 So the leader must do, for example, now going to the right, personnel issues or strategic planning. That's something the leader must be intimately involved with. What's something that a leader should do, but could involve others: Reporting, budgeting for example. Something that the leader could do, but others could do it if given the opportunity. There's a lot that falls into that and we already touched on some of those, so I'm not going to repeat them. What others should do but the leader could help with in an emergency, may relate to routine decision making or even customer service. So maybe for example, you have somebody else handling customer service, but there's a problem and it gets escalated or their short on staff on a given day, maybe a leader will step in on rare occasion. And finally what others must be doing on a regular basis. In this case, I chose bookkeeping and clerical work. But you could have your other examples that the others need to be the ones doing it and the leader really needs to be outside looking in.
27:18 So utilizing a Must-Should-Could Pyramid could be a very powerful way by which you can start to get a sense of what do I need to be doing as the leader because that's really my task and responsibility and how do I start to flesh out the question of what somebody else should be, could be doing on occasion, versus what somebody else really should be doing, if not always, then certainly often. And once you start putting things out there, you're going to start to see that there's only a relatively small amount of things that the leader must do. Again, the pyramid gets narrow at the top and even the things that the leader should do is relatively narrow compared to all the other tasks and responsibilities that may be going on. So think about that and really give meaningful consideration. And if you're not sure, I would encourage you to ask somebody else whether it's somebody who reports to you, one of your direct reports, whether it's a colleague, somebody who's let's say a parallel, another manager within the leadership team or another executive within the C-Suite or maybe somebody on the board of directors that you trust that you could ask these questions to. Anyone like that could give you meaningful feedback.
28:31 But you can already start to see that there's a lot of stuff that you are doing today that others could, and in many cases, should be doing instead. And I hope that this is really helpful because once you start to master this, it's a huge game breaker or game changer, I should say, in terms of what's on your plate and all of the other issues about being stressed out and feeling like you're just buried in work and you can never get out of the office. All that starts to change because you really have more control of your schedule and you better understand what to say yes to and what to allocate to others. It doesn't mean you just punt it to them as we've discussed, but at least you knowing now somebody else should be doing this. How do I get to a point where somebody else we'll be doing this?
29:20 This delegation worksheet, which I'm happy to share with you certainly, message me or include me in the comments there. I'm going to fire one out to you. But a delegation worksheet is really very simple. Left column. What is the task? And you write it down. In the middle, you ask yourself, can this be delegated? A simple Y or N would be sufficient. Sometimes you might say sometimes or often you might hedge it a little bit, but at least you're beginning the process of reflecting on can this be delegated or not. And then finally you ask yourself to whom should it be delegated? And that person may not even exist yet within your organization. And then you could write virtual assistant or future hire or something like this. But at least you know, I see this responsibility should go to such a person and this one and this one.
30:13 And already you start to decide does this constitute a virtual employee? Is this a part-time hire? Is it a full time hire? And you can then decide if you could justify it, financial and otherwise. But in most cases, if there's enough of the right work that you can be delegating to someone, you should be able to justify it financially because you're going to get so much more out of it on the back end with that investment that it's definitely worth your while. Okay. So some of the benefits of this delegation process we've already touched on. Worthwhile to review again as well. Number one, a significant time savings. When you're delegating work, it gets finished sooner. You have more time for yourself. You have your people have more time as well. This is general feeling that there's a responsible nature to the amount of work that is being asked of people.
31:04 And that creates more engagement, more positivity. There's a lot of emotional benefits as well, which is that second bullet. People feel empowered. They're motivated, they're engaged, they feel respected. So the benefits are huge and I certainly would encourage you to begin the process already. Now, even though we haven't covered everything, begin the process. Let's go back to that slide for just a moment. Start listing out your tasks, identifying what can be delegated. That alone will be so huge for you because you're gonna start to say, "Oh, I don't have to do this anymore. I can find somebody else for this." And even though you're not ready necessarily to give it to them today, that recognition will be relieving and transformative for you and you'll start to think very differently about your situation. So we've run through quite a bit in a short period of time and I plan to be creating more content because I'm just so passionate about this and I want you to have actionable skills.
32:06 But here are a couple of follow-up questions that I'd like for us to consider because I think these are top of mind for so many of us. Number one is a long one. Let's go through it. "I know that my people aren't up to be delegated to them at this, by the way, is a direct quote from one of the responses of the survey. I know that my people aren't up to being delegated to meaning. They say they're not ready yet. How can I possibly close the gap between where they are today and where I need to get them without taking so much time that it makes it not worth it?" We've mentioned this before. Let's reiterate it here. I need people who are effective. I need people who know what they're doing. And I want to do it without just taking all of my time and energy to get them up to speed so that it becomes a worth it for me.
32:51 If I'm gonna spend so much time training someone, I may as well just do it myself. So how do we get past that? It's a massive hurdle and it deserves attention. And here's another one. How could I know that my efforts will pay off with a quality outcome? Maybe I'm going to invest all this time in someone, and by the time that everything is done, they're just going to produce poor communication, a lousy result, it's going to get other people upset. People are gonna think that I'm not doing anything. I want a quality outcome that justifies the effort and that justifies the investment financially in time and emotional energy, et cetera. So that's what we're going to focus on in our next webinar. Number one, how to find the right person? And number two, how to make sure that they're up to the task?
33:41 How do I train them or empower them to be successful? So before we go, uh, first of all, if you're still with me, that means that you've really committed yourself to learning about delegation and on top of it that you are somebody who I think can really help get the word out there. And for me, I'm an introvert, so I need your energy, your interaction, and your feedback to really kind of juice myself up and to keep this going. I have so much I want to give, but it's going to be so much easier for me to do that with your participation and support. So please, please comment below. Let me know your thoughts, put your questions out there. Let's make this a conversation and of course be open to sharing this as well.
34:29 If you know anybody that would appreciate this recording, anyone who would benefit from some of the strategies that we started to put out there and you think would be interested in hearing new content right away, as soon as it becomes available, please do pass it onto them. So I'm going to wrap up for today and our focus again was on when went to delegate, when not to delegate. We have so much to talk about. Thank you again for joining me on this recording and I hope that is an impactful and productive day for you.