Purpose and paradigms behind effective delegation

If this is your first visit, hello and welcome! I write about how to enable a visionary concept called Fulfilling Performance. My first posts explain what that is but you can just jump in here too...

Image credit: Gerd Altmann

Hello fellow Enablers,

Having encouraged you to have a go at leading from behind, I thought it'd be helpful to follow that up with a few words on the purpose and paradigms behind effective delegation, which is a fundamental skill for leaders to master.

This week I'll share some paradigms to encourage us to delegate more, and next week I'll share with you how to apply the Guiding Principles of Fulfilling Performance to help you delegate effectively and in a way that's constructive in growing your people.

Your role is to produce results AND grow the people

Back in 2006, I was about to move from the UK to take up a role in BMW's Asia-Pacific Regional Headquarters, based in Singapore.

Before I even finished my UK job, I was invited to attend a leadership development program which would turn out to be highly impactful for me. It was held on the Entabeni game reserve in South Africa and was facilitated by Ed Eppley, who became a friend and mentor and was my special guest for our 50th episode of my CAREER-VIEW MIRROR podcast.

I'd already had responsibility for people in my roles prior to then, but it was during that week that Ed instilled in me and my cohort on that program a paradigm about my role as a leader that has stayed with me ever since. This is what he said:

Andy, your role as a manager is to produce results and grow the people. Growing your people means you increase their capability so that next year they can be more productive without having to work harder.

He went on to point out that typically, organisations need to increase their productivity by 3-5% per year just to stand still because of rising operating expenses.

Beware of The Gap Trap

More recently I was back learning from Ed again. We were at Aileron, which is an amazing facility for entrepreneurs in Ohio, and I was experiencing him delivering this message as part of their course for presidents. He was explaining to the assembled group of entrepreneurs the consequences of not growing their people and of not increasing their capability and productivity year on year.

For the first year or two, maybe you can make up the slack by doing some of the team's work yourself on top of your own and getting the team to put in longer hours. Or maybe you hire an extra resource which temporarily increases productivity but also raises your cost base, so you actually find your ratios going backwards.

Eventually you can't close this gap in productivity between what you need from your team and what you're getting, and you fall into what Ed calls “The Gap Trap”.

You can read more insights about professional management practices as taught at Aileron in Ed's book. Let's Be Clear.

By the time I arrived on this leadership program in South Africa, I'd spent a large part of my career in sales and was fully aware of my responsibility to deliver results. I also knew I had some responsibility to develop my team, but this was the first time that I'd seen my responsibility to grow my people presented to me in equally big letters alongside my responsibility to deliver results.

It had a big impact then and it stayed with me ever since.

Effective paradigms for delegation

As with anything that we do that we want to do well, we'll achieve better outcomes as leaders if we adopt effective paradigms from the outset.

Very briefly, our paradigms are the way we see the world. They influence the thoughts we have, the actions we take and the results that we get. Sometimes they're effective and serve as well. Other times they're ineffective and do us more harm than good. We can change them intentionally or they can be changed by external factors that cause us to have a paradigm shift or mini-paradigm shift. If they're left unchanged by us or events, they'll continue running in the background like a piece of software, subconsciously filtering thoughts, promoting certain behaviours and driving associated outcomes.

When we truly adopt the paradigm that our role as a manager is to deliver results and grow the people, or even grow the people to deliver increasingly better results, that paradigm automatically influences the thoughts we have and the multiple downstream actions we take in a day.

For example, when a new request lands in our inbox, our first thought will be, for which team member does this task represent a development opportunity?

When we adopt the paradigm that we should be doing the work that only we can do and we delegate the rest, we free up more of our time to lead our team and to support our boss with their work, and that increases our value to the business, and we grow ourselves in the process.

Delegating tasks deliberately

When I talk about delegating here, I'm talking about delegating tasks deliberately, as part of someone's development and so that we can free up time to do something that only we can do. I recognize that sometimes we need to delegate tasks just to get them done in a proficient way, because we're working within some constraints. Think of that behaviour as part of the “deliver results” responsibility rather than “growing the people”. It's a necessary part of getting the work done and it's fine, as long as it doesn't become an excuse for lazy leadership.

We grow furthest and fastest in the direction of our strengths.

Before we jump into dishing out tasks to your team, there are a few other paradigms that you might want to adopt and live by to maximize the chances of you succeeding with your delegation.

How do we choose the most appropriate team member for the task?

Ideally, we want to assign it to someone for whom this will be playing to their strengths. As my good friend Dr Peter Dry says:

We grow furthest and fastest (and have more fun!) when we grow in the direction of our strengths.

If something's challenging and aligned with our strengths, we'll be much better placed to grow from it than if it's challenging because it's something that we're not good at.

Balance the level of challenge with the individual’s capability

Ideally, to provoke engagement and growth, the task should be challenging without being overwhelming. If the level of challenge is appropriately balanced against their capability, it's most likely to put them into flow.

Flow is a psychological state that's highly conducive to productivity. I’ll talk more about flow and share an example of how my former boss successfully leveraged it to develop me in a future post on Flow, Purpose and Growing People.

Delegation is not abdication

And for our final paradigm, before we start looking at how to delegate, let's remind ourselves that delegation is not abdication. When we delegate, we hand over responsibility for carrying out a task to someone else, but we retain responsibility for the quality, quantity, and timeliness of the outcome.

As well as picking the most appropriate team member for the task and realizing that we remain responsible for the result, what else can we do to increase the chances of success when we delegate?

This is where the Guiding Principles of Fulfilling Performance can help us become more intentional, effective and let's not forget confident in our delegating.

Next week I'll walk you through how we can apply them to help us delegate more effectively.

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The Aquilae Academy: Guided peer mentoring and coaching for executives, senior leaders and business owners.

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Thank you,

Andy

andy@aquilae.co.uk