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Have you ever delegated a task and then six weeks later wonder what happened to it? Avoid the delegation black hole, help your team to work more productively, and distinguish yourself as a manager who gets more done with this one delegation secret.
“I’m so frustrated.” Martin, the Senior Vice President of a rapidly-growing communication hardware company serving the United States, leaned back in his chair and blew a heavy sigh past his mustache. “I’m hoping you can help me. It’s like there’s some key leadership skill I never learned.”
He continued: “Three of my direct reports are behind on projects I delegated. I walked through our contact center and customer service was a mess even though we invested all that time in training. Our quality initiative is stuck in neutral…it just seems like we can’t seem to get anything done.”
Martin is well versed in leadership and management. He knows the M.I.T. (Most Important Thing), how to set clear shared expectations, how to make sure everyone knows how to succeed, he knows how to reinforce what success looks like, and he knows how to inspire, to celebrate when it goes well, and how to hold everyone accountable when it doesn’t.
He knows all of these fundamental leadership skills.
So what’s the problem? What’s the leadership skill that Martin feels like he’s missing?
As we work with thousands of leaders around the world and watch them start using Winning Well leadership and management strategies, we’ve seen a common theme when it comes to who succeeds over time:
When it comes to changing a culture or transforming results, they don’t just start – they finish.
Sadly, organizations are littered with leaders who start, but never finish:
It doesn’t take many of these failed commitments before your team loses faith in your ability to make change happen, and worse, you lose faith in yourself.
When you set an intention and follow through your confidence increases. Your team knows they can believe you, trust you, and rely on you. You credibility builds.
Finishing is a choice. It doesn’t happen by chance. In fact, the chances are it won’t happen at all.
Here’s the deal: life is busy. You’ve got more to do than time to do it. Your plan is going to get interrupted and your interruptions are going to get interrupted. If you don’t have an intentional, focused way to finish what you start, it won’t happen.
Effective leaders consistently choose to finish – but they don’t leave it to chance or a heroic act of willpower.
If you have to spend energy trying to remember everything you need to finish you’ll never do it. There’s just too much going on and your brain has limited energy. Just thinking about every open loop can be exhausting.
There’s a better way: schedule the finish.
The moment you set an intention, make an appointment with yourself or with the other person where you will complete the intention or take the next step. The key is when. What moment in time will you follow up, follow through, and finish?
Here are some examples:
The key in all these examples is to make an appointment. There is a difference between a to-do item and scheduled time on your calendar, particularly when that time is scheduled with another person. The likelihood of you both keeping your commitment increases significantly.
For items that don’t naturally fit in a calendar appointment (eg: you’re rolling out a new process to improve on-time delivery and quality), you can still make appointments with yourself to reinforce the initiative (communicate at least five times through five different channels) and to review performance.
When you create an expectation – particularly a new one that is the result of training or a new process – follow through on behavior quickly. When people get the behavior right, celebrate it, acknowledge it, and reinforce that this is what people like us do.
When it doesn’t happen, have quick INSPIRE conversations to redirect people back to the new way of doing things. If there are problems that prevent people from doing what’s needed, solve them quickly and visibly.
(This is the strategy at the core of the Confidence Burst strategy.)
Finishing isn’t flashy, but it’s a leadership skill with a huge payoff.
Martin didn’t need to learn a new strategy or read another book. His only missing leadership skill was to finish what he started.
Finish. Schedule the follow-through. Don’t leave it to chance or your to-do list.
We’d love to hear from you: As a leader, how do you ensure you finish what you start?
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I grumbled and shook my head. For what seemed like the 37th time that week, an assignment I’d delegated had not come back on time. I wondered once again how to delegate work so that it actually gets done.
I was so tired of chasing down unfinished tasks and stressed because the time I spent making sure those things happened was taking me away from other critical tasks.
It wasn’t that my people were unmotivated or incompetent. They were awesome: they loved their work and were good at what they did. Like you, however, they often faced a day full of competing priorities and unexpected crises that had to be handled quickly.
Fortunately, I discovered a solution…
You know you’re supposed to delegate.
You understand that you can’t achieve breakthrough results on your own, that leadership means achieving results through relationships, and that when you delegate, you multiply yourself.
You know all that, but delegation can still be, in the words of one of our clients, “So freakin’ frustrating!”
How often have you delegated something, only to find yourself many weeks later thinking, “Whatever happened to that project?”
It happened to me so many times – until I learned one vital step about how to delegate work effectively.
This one delegation secret changed everything for me and ensured that almost every delegated assignment came back on time and complete.
What would it mean for you if you never had to chase down another unfinished assignment or project? How much time would you save? How much more productive could you be?
Surprisingly, this is a delegation process very few leaders use and yet it is simple and you can use it right away. Before I give you the tool, let’s take a quick look at delegation.
Delegation is the act of sharing responsibility and authority for a task, project, or outcome with another person. This definition is important – you’ll see why in a moment.
Before you delegate, you want to make sure of three things:
Okay, so let’s say you’ve checked off those items. It’s time to delegate: you clearly describe the outcome and set a clear finish line for when the assignment will be completed.
Most leaders do that much, but when you’re focused on how to delegate so nothing falls through the cracks, there is one more critical step and this is what changes everything:
Mutually schedule a time to receive the task.
For example:
If the prototype is due on the last day of the month, make an appointment with the person to meet with you and show you what they’ve done.
If the assignment is to survey customers, prepare their comments, and provide a recommendation, set a specific time on a specific day when you will meet together and they will share what they did.
A specific time. A specific day.
When someone knows they will be sitting down with you at a specific moment in time, the task won’t get buried and forgotten. If there’s a real possibility that they won’t get it done, most people will come talk to you. Then you can provide coaching or help them manage their workload.
When you mutually schedule an appointment to receive the task, you’ve started from a place of active accountability. Most people won’t show up to that meeting empty-handed. (And if they do, it’s time for a serious INPSIRE conversation.)
When we share this delegation tool, leaders often have two “Yeah, but what about…?” reactions.
The first is “Yeah, but this will take too much time.”
The reality is that it will save you time. A five-minute meeting to receive the task saves you countless hours of wasted time chasing down incomplete work.
The second is “Yeah, but what about longer projects? If you wait until the end to meet, it’s too late.”
That’s true. For longer projects, schedule periodic updates where the person you’ve delegated to will bring you a progress update, an outline, or whatever intermediary step is appropriate. The key is that they bring something to the meeting that shows their progress.
Remember that when you delegate, you’re still responsible: you share responsibility, you don’t give up responsibility. You are still responsible to ensure your team achieves what it is you delegated.
Schedule the follow-up at the same time you delegate the task and you’ll never again waste time chasing down forgotten assignments.
Leave us a comment and share your thoughts, questions, and tips to delegate so that nothing falls through the cracks.
Are you working too hard?
Does everything fall apart when you’re not around?
Do you find yourself bailing out your boss, your peers, and your team?
If you can answer YES to any of these questions, it’s likely you’re being held back by the “Best Damn Doer” syndrome.
Be careful.
I know. I’ve felt the guilt of being promoted over people working longer and harder than me.
I’ve also promoted the “right candidate” over the one with the most sweat equity in the game.
And the other night, I had one of my clients ask me to help “John,” his high-potential “best damn doer.”
“John’s the go-to for everyone, he adds huge value AND it’s holding him and the business back. How do we get him past being ‘the best damn doer?'”
The Best Damn Doers are the glue, the lynch-pins, the guys or gals who consistently win the awards…. AND yet are frustrated when year over year their less “competent” peers get promoted.
If this sounds like you, here are a few ways to back away from the grind and add additional value to the team–and your career.
Bottom line. The more you can replicate your best damn doer skills, the better the results, for your organization, the team, and for your career.
Step away from the doing, and watch the magic.
