Delegate to Accelerate Lesson 2: Who to Delegate to
This second “Delegate to Accelerate” recording (first can be found here) addresses who we should be delegating to and how to get them up to speed so that we can trust them to do the job right.
We also address what to do if such a person is not presently employed by you.
Listen in to the below recording to learn more and to bring yourself that much closer to true acceleration!
And if you’re not already on my mailing list, sign up here so that you don’t miss another post!
Full audio transcript
00:00 Hey everyone, it's Naphtali and welcome back to the "Delegate to Accelerate" mini-series number two. In our first recording we talked about a bunch of things, but our focus in terms of learning and takeaway, was on two issues. Number one, as we will unpack soon, we talked about what delegation is and what it isn't. I'm going to recap that more detail shortly. We also talked about when one should delegate and when one shouldn't. And in this presentation, I'm going to focus on "who" because it is critical that we have the right people to delegate to and probably the biggest factor in many cases for people not moving forward with delegation is the fact that they don't feel that they have somebody that they could be delegating to. So let's dive in on all that goodness and unpack some real issues as well as concrete strategies to move you forward so that you could delegate to accelerate.
01:04 A quick reminder about me. I am an executive coach, President of Impactful Coaching & Consulting (ImpactfulCoaching.com,) and what I do is help leaders who struggle to manage their workloads and get home at a decent hour to delegate and be more productive so that they could scale profits with less stress. So we want to remove the stress, remove the angst, remove the challenges that we encounter because we've got so much work to do and we don't seem to feel like we have the right people to delegate the work too. But we can do it. And with proper delegation skills and with proper technique, we're going to be able to manage our workloads, get home, spend quality time with the right people and do the right work when we're in the office. Here is another one of our, not literal but Impactful clients.
02:02 Someone who is completely overwhelmed with work has stuff to do up to the wazoo and beyond. A to-do list that grows and grows and grows. And if you can imagine yourself behind that desk. Let's remove the phone for a moment, a little bit antiquated, and maybe even the filing cabinet. And frankly all those papers are a bit dated there. But the idea, the message I think still is as relevant as ever. And if you can see yourself in that desk, just feeling overwhelmed, you are in the right place because we are going to offer some strategy to help you move forward. Here is our recap video and so that, you know, this is a live video link as well as here. And so if you didn't see the first video, if you want to review it, you could easily link it up over here where you can find it in one of my, communications.
02:53 Of course, if you want to just message me and I'll shoot it over to you. These are the four points we made in the previous presentation, which I mentioned at that first slide. Number one, why delegation is so important. Number two, what it is and what it isn't. Number three, when to do it and when not to do it. And also personal and client experiences. So a brief review. Number one, delegation is critical as we know because we are overwhelmed. We're all on, let's call it Pearl's "burnout freeway." We all feel like we just have so much on our plate. We have to be able to delegate. Delegation, I'm going to actually read a definition to you which I shared the last time as well. "Delegation is the shifting of authority and responsibility for particular functions, tasks or decisions from one person, usually a leader or manager, to another.
03:42 I'm going to read that again. "Delegation is the shifting of authority and responsibility for particular functions at tasks or decisions from one person, usually a leader or manager to another." So it's all about shifting responsibility, shifting authority. It sits in our lap and we want to move it to somebody else because we want to get the work off of our plate. We want to do the right kind of work. We also want to empower others. All the benefits that we will try to unpack as we continue. What delegation is not. It is not dumping or abdicating personal responsibility. So it's not like you just saying, "I have a responsibility but I don't care. I'm going to give it to somebody else." That's certainly not what delegation is about. Nor is it telling people what to do. That would be directing. Rather we want to understand that delegation is about empowering.
04:40 It's about clearing your desk. All these things we've discussed and we will continue to unpack that further as we move forward. Here's a slide that I shared with you the last time as well about when to and when not to delegate. Brief review of that. On the left side, we see when we do delegate. The most important, probably the reason why we're here, is because we have too much work and when there's so much work, we have to be able to find others who could help us. The other three relate to the other individual. Somebody who has a particular skill or qualification, somebody who expresses interest, somebody who you may want to empower and develop their leadership skills. So in that case, you're thinking about the other person. Obviously, the second one is an important piece because we have to think about what is the task and do I have a person who could fit the task?
05:37 And that's what we're gonna unpack much more in today's presentation, but delegation is not, is or what we should not be delegating, I should say, or things what we might call our own hot potatoes. Important matters with serious consequences or things that are usually my or your specific responsibility. So it falls under your job description. It's something you need to be doing. We talked previously about the "must, could, should." So this would be something that is must or must be completed by you that obviously you would not delegate. Things you wouldn't willingly do. I got into that the last time exactly how that's defined. But basically we're talking about things that, um, you're not just looking to quote unquote dump onto somebody else. And then finally, obviously you don't want to delegate to somebody who is not up to the task. So these are some basic guidelines that we reviewed.
06:30 And of course if you want to get into it in greater detail, do go back to our first recording, where you'll get all that information and more. Some charts and some examples and some tools to use to make clearer determinations. So now let's review our benefits before we jump into the focus of our presentation today. Number one, significant time-saving. Your work is finished sooner. More time with the people that you love. Stress is reduced. All those benefits we talked about before. And number two, the empowerment of others. This is so critical and I think in today's day and age we need to be really mindful of this because we know that engagement is low. We know that turnover is high. We know that our Millennials and younger workers in particular feel often that they don't have a meaningful place for themselves in an work environment, certainly not that they see themselves growing into.
07:24 So if we can create leadership pipelines, it will increase empowerment. It will increase engagement. It will get people thinking that they really have a meaningful contribution to make in your company. They will likely stick around longer. They certainly will talk positively about your you and your company or your organization. And in general, we're just creating leaders for the community, the work community, the business community, the broader community, if you will, at large. And that's something that we have to be thinking about as well. What is my impact as a leader and what am I doing to make the world a better place? Yes, it's driving the bottom line and driving results, but it's also positively impacting the people that we are responsible for. Who are our workers, our team members, our direct reports. So empowering them and giving them tools, encouraging them, something we might call creating a delegation culture, encouraging them to think about delegation and to request opportunities when they see a good fit for themselves.
08:24 All of these really are the responsibility of a leader and certainly constitute benefits in the area of delegation. So today we are going to solve for "who." And here's a quote on the right side, which is a direct quote that I pulled out of one of the survey responses. And by the way, if you were one of the people who did respond, I thank you so much for making that contribution, giving me your input. And a lot of that, as you will see, has or will make its way into the content that I'm sharing. So one person responded, "even though I now know what to delegate, I still don't have anyone to get to delegate to." So again, going back to what we talked about before, we didn't unpack that fully, but we did talk about it. And we had certain charts that we use to determine is this something I should be keeping for myself or something I should be delegating to someone else?
09:17 And I guess we would say we used "when" and "what" somewhat interchangeably. When should I delegate is another way of saying what should I delegate? So even if I have that information clear, that's wonderful. But if I don't have the right person to be delegating to, it's not going to make a difference. So we have to think about who are we solving for or who are we going to be utilizing to help us and where are they? Do they exist right now? Do they not? And how do we proceed accordingly? So in effect, we typically have two options. Option number one is where we have no one. And option number two is we have someone but not yet positioned for this kind of work. Let's take them one at a time. And you'll notice in parentheses included the names of the individuals, former clients or coworkers that I referenced in our first presentation.
10:10 So in David's case, David is again, a small business owner in the New York city area and he services landlords and lawyers and certain other individuals in the real estate space. He was just in over his head with work and was not able to get out there and sell and find the really the big clients, the big fish that would take his business to the next level. So he needed somebody, but he didn't have that person. And so he needed to hire. So sometimes we have that right time to hire, go fill a position. And of course as you're thinking about who you want, knowing what you intend to give those people, what we might call their job description, is going to be critical. Use primary tasks list and related skillset as the key driver. So we talked the last time about creating a primary tasks list.
11:03 What is it that you need to be doing for yourself and what are you taking off of your plate? And those items as they come off the plate, they go onto the plate of the future hire, in this case, that will then of course be considered as part of the of the job search. Do you have the skill set? Do you have the aptitude and the interest in doing this work? Now another way to approach it, especially if you're on a shoestring budget, is to consider a VA, a virtual assistant. There's so many choices out there. I use Fiverr quite a bit and Upwork as well. There are others. So I would encourage you to become familiar with these platforms in the kind of services that you could get,
11:45 anything from a basic virtual assistant to somebody who has particular expertise, whether it's in video editing or graphics or accounting or socia media management, et cetera, et cetera. There's so many different things that people out there can provide for you and in many cases at a very, very reasonable price, to the point where it's a no brainer almost for you to be passing on that kind of work to somebody else. And I do this all the time because it helps me do the work that I really need to be doing first and foremost. So that's option one. And frankly in many cases, that's the worst option. On the other hand, it gives you an opportunity to begin with a clean slate. Number two is where you want to reconsider or repurpose existing personnel. So we talked about Laurie the last time, who was an office manager and my personal secretary and the work she was doing.
12:41 And how based on her background and her passion for marketing and for community and for admissions, that we moved her into a role of admissions director and part-time PR director as well, which is a lot, but at least we put somebody there either in a case where there was nobody before or somebody from the administration who should not have been doing it, was doing it, and the result was a mess. We just didn't have the ability to focus on the most important things that academic leadership needs to be focusing on. So by putting Laurie in this position, it allowed us a lot of freedom to reimagine how we would do things moving forward. She was engaged, she got a little bit of a salary increase, but more importantly, she got a position that really aligned with her interests and her values.
13:30 And if you can find someone, oftentimes there is somebody in your office who's kind of under the radar and you may just need to go through your Rolodex, so to speak, and say, you know, how would this person respond? What kind of skills do they have and do we think that maybe they could be a good fit? And it doesn't have to be an immediate full time delegation where you're doing it and it becomes a permanent change. You can onboard slowly, but at least you are exploring options that perhaps you wouldn't have explored in the past. Now this I think is just a huge breakthrough from a thought process in terms of the idea of how we interact with and ultimately help people within our organization do work and the kind of role that we have with them. And this comes from Ken Blanchard and his associates, the idea of what's called Situational Leadership.
14:25 I'm just going to capture if I can, the essence of it by focusing on the red and the green, the bottom two quadrants of the upper square. And you'll notice that there is a shift from S1, it goes up and then to the left and then down. But S1 one across then would be S4. We start with directing, when we have somebody who needs a lot of oversight, doesn't know the job at all. Needs a lot of direction, hand holding, we might call it. Eventually the goal is to get somebody to where they could really be delegated to. So this actually helps us to define what delegation is. As we've been talking about, it's not for somebody usually on the front end. It's for somebody on the backend of expertise and motivation. So they don't need a lot of, they don't need a lot of direction because they have a lot of it on their own. And they don't even need a lot of support because they're comfortable and they're confident and they're motivated.
15:22 But they just need a little bit of coaching and guidance here and there. And of course they need to have you work with them on setting the goals and the expectations and whatnot. But this is a nice continuum as you think about it. And if you really want to understand this very well, I would encourage you to pick up Ken Blanchard's "Leadership and the One Minute Manager," because that's really the core book and the core presentation, if you will, of these concepts of how we move somebody from the beginning to the eventual end. Now you might find somebody within your organization or even from without, that's already S2, S3, maybe even S4 and that would be great. But even if you have to start at S1, the goal here is we're thinking about the long term. We want to play the long game on this.
16:09 We want to say to ourselves, if I can find the right person and train them in and empower them, give them the tools that they need and all of that, eventually what's going to happen is they're going to own it. It'll cost me a lot of time up front. And who has all that time to give? As it is, we're feeling overwhelmed. But if you view it as an investment and you take the time to onboard the person and really get them up to speed - and maybe you don't even have to be the one doing it, maybe there's somebody else you could task to help this person develop - you're going to find that with the right people in place, it's going to be a huge win for you. And so much more time will be freed up over time as you move your process forward.
16:49 So now we have the right people. Well, let's assume that we do. Let's assume that we understand that we're going to move them into that S4 delegation quadrant. But part of what we need in order to do, to be able to do that. And this goes back to who it is that we want to bring on board. You might recall in an earlier slide, one of the things that we said was we want to delegate to someone who has the proper skill set and we don't want to delegate to somebody who does not. Now, obviously you may not have a choice, but at least what you can be doing is thinking about how do you catch them up to speed as quickly as possible. And here are some questions you want to be asking yourself to get you to that place. Number one, what are they still need to know or learn?
17:33 And we're going to talk about a skills gap analysis. It's going to help us to determine where's the gap between what they need to know or be able to do to where they are presently and how do we fill it? Next question is how will they learn it? So if we recognize that they need to learn more about, let's just say graphic design, how am I going to position them to learn it? Whether it's a mentor or an online course, an in-person course, some other way to learn it, experimentation. But they have to be empowered to learn. And how they practice. What opportunities will I give them to practice these skills. Maybe they're going to have that practice elsewhere. If it is in-house, try to think of some small jobs that don't have to be performed in particular way and can be finessed or are maybe just owned by somebody else
18:28 and in a low risk environment. Maybe even a project that nobody knows about yet, but over time will be informed about once it's in more of a "rollout stage." So there are a lot of different ways to be creative here. The main thing is we need to know that we can't just dump and run. We have to be very strategic. We have to be very supportive. We have to help the other person recognize that we're there to help them and that we're not going to leave them alone. We are going to support them, provide them with tools and skills, et cetera, because we want them very much to succeed as much as if not more than they themselves want to be successful. So here's that gap analysis we talked about before. And what is it, "where you are" on the left to "where you need to be" and identify what are those skills that are going to help you get there and of course create an action plan.
19:23 I'm not gonna elaborate here because we talked about it much in the previous slide, but that is a very important point. And if we go through it well and of course involve the other person, the delegatee, the person you're thinking of delegating to, involve him or her as well. What do you think you need to be successful? Who would you like to speak to about this? What concerns do you have? What opportunities do you see in this process? Get them very much involved because the more involved they are, the better the outcome is going to be. And certainly the more buy in you're going to get. Now, why is this topic so important? It's because we all know that workplace burnout is real. If you are a small business owner you know that a very, very high percentage of individuals, owners and small businesses feel the effects of burnout at least some of the time.
20:16 It's hard work and we're doing it day after day. There's a grind and grinds are difficult. If you're older, your burnout rate is approaching 60% and if you're younger, the burnout rate is even higher. And that may just have to do with the mindset that we go into work with and may have to do with some of the core values that we operate with. It's not a judgment statement. It's just these are the realities. And since we are looking to employ people typically speaking, who are younger, who have many more years that they could potentially offer to our company or organization, we don't like this 84% burnout rate. That's very high. We have to do good things to protect ourselves and protect others from burnout. And then you see the statistic on the bottom is even beyond that 84, it's at 94% for those 18 and above in that younger bracket.
21:05 So these are real numbers and we have to be mindful of it and we need to find solutions. And my statement to you, my claim, and I think hopefully by now if you're still with me, it's because you believe it as well, is that delegation is a critical piace and a real solution towards mitigating workplace burnout. So delegation to the rescue. Now, questions that often come up. You know, sometimes people will say to me, yeah, I want to delegate, but you know, I've managed until now. So, what you're talking about involves some work and I've got to do some research and I've got to have conversations. So I'd rather just do what I have done until now. And there's a quote from Tony Robbins that I love and I've used it before, even in this mini-series, I think in the previous presentation as well.
21:59 It's basically the idea that if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. Which means that if you don't change your approach, you can't expect to get a change in the outcome. So if you want more time for yourself, if you want less stress, if you want to increase productivity and engagement, empower your people, all of the things we've been talking about and you don't feel like you have that right now, you've got to think differently and you have to take different action. And if I can quote Tony again, you have to take massive action because that's what's going to drive you to that next level of growth and success. So that was one problem. I've managed that way before. Here is one other that I'd like to unpack with you. "I can't trust my people to get the work done without me."
22:52 This one is probably the single biggest concern that I've seen in the survey research so far. All the feedback keeps coming back. Trust and trust and trust. I can't trust them. They won't do it the way I do it. It won't look the same. It won't feel the same. People are going to complain about it. So number one today already we began to approach that because we started to talk about how do you train your people and the more you train them and the more you give them specific guidance about how something should look and give them examples, the better the result is going to be. In our next presentation we're going to focus on, number one, how to get these other people to commit to the work that needs to be done. Because that's a piece of it too. Many times leaders feel that they give work to somebody but the other person doesn't want to take it and so it doesn't get done. It's like passive aggressive. They just leave it alone and they hope that the request will go away, which of course is not a solution.
23:51 And number two, how can they get onto the same page so that when it gets done, it gets done correctly. That is the key thing that I think if we could solve that, so many more people would be delegating than do today. So these are some challenges. I'm aware of them. And I'm here to help you and me and all of us solve them. So this is a wrap of our presentation today and like the last time I'm going to ask you again, I am the "capital I" introvert and your interaction and feedback is what gives me energy and the drive to continue to put out this content, to share ideas and hopefully to make a difference. So please do comment below wherever you're seeing this video, whether it's on my blog or on YouTube or anywhere else. Please do comment. Let me know your thoughts. And of course, if you know anybody who you think would benefit from watching this video, from learning these ideas and from practicing the strategies that we've been talking about, please do pass it on. The goal here is to make the maximum impact possible. So thank you again for joining me on this recording. I am super delighted to be able to have shared it with you and I really hope that we can continue the conversation the next recording and beyond. Thanks again for being with me and have a great day.