Effective Delegation
Posted on August 15, 2017 by Shawn Yates, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.
What does it mean to delegate? When should you delegate? Why can it be so hard to delegate and how can you overcome it? Here are some thoughts...
This week I facilitated a week long strategy and process creation workshop for the R&D organization of a medical device company. We ended up with 3 operational value streams (rough and high level), a 1 year product road map and a process for keeping the road map fresh and current.
One thing that stands out as I look back at the workshop is the topic of executive engagement and delegation. While a few members of the executive team were present on the first day, the primary attendees and contributes were the directors of various departments. This led to a few challenges along the way.
Each director knew the top priority of their respective executive. However, none felt empowered enough to negotiate with other directors regarding the company’s top priorities. While they tried to step back and take a holistic look at the business, none could confidently say that their executive’s #1 would be less important than another executive’s #1 from the overall point of view.
We used some methods to quantify and compare the conflicting priorities which were originally qualitatively generated. This allowed us to generate a 1 to n priority list for the business. Because the participants couldn’t fully commit to the priority list, the output of the workshop was a proposal rather than a commitment.
All this gives me two thoughts I want to share around the topic of delegation.
The first thought is around how/why the executive team of this business is like this at the moment. Over the last two years this business has grown very quickly from a small team to a medium sized business. When the business was small, the executives were hands on in every aspect of strategy development and tactical execution, as would be expected. As the business grew it was very natural for the executives to continue to be involved in the tactical decision making. There is a certain rush when you solve an urgent matter and execute which is very appealing, even addicting, to many leaders.
Now that the business is large enough to have directors under the executives, it’s time for a shift in where the executives place their time and focus. They have to find the right levels of engagement and delegation across the strategic and tactical concerns to create a balanced and effective organization. The execs need to pull themselves out of the fray of the tactical and begin to put more time and energy into the strategic direction of the company.
The second thought I wanted to share was the idea of what delegation should look like. To be honest, I don’t think strategy development should be delegated – it’s a core component of what the executives of an organization should be focused on (a topic I will be discussing with the business in question in the coming weeks). Even though the wrong thing (strategy) was delegated in this case, discussing what proper delegation looks like is a good idea.
Part of the challenge these executives face is that they are not yet willing to fully delegate some decisions. When a decision is delegated, the person delegating must be willing to accept the decision made by the person to whom the decision was delegated. The delegator must fully inform the delegee of their concerns, desires and peripheral knowledge around the decision in question. The delegator must fully empower the delegee.
You can imagine that if this is the vision of delegation, it can be very hard to do, especially if the person doing the delegating has been making those decisions on their own in the past. They may feel detached or a sense of loss by not being engaged with the decision-making process. It may help if they can identify what it is they will replace that decision making with. In the case of these executives, I would like to see them replace the tactical decisions and focus more on overall strategic direction. As the saying goes, they should be working ON the business rather than IN the business. A tough, but vital transition to make as the company grows.
I hope you found this useful and thought provoking. If you want to improve your delegation skills, I am ready to help!
