September 2007: Delegate or Abdicate?

Of all the techniques we teach our clients, delegation is easily the most powerful and the one that most profoundly improves the operation of a business and an owner’s life.

“But,” you say, “Every time I assign someone to do something, it gets screwed up, and I end up having to do it myself anyway. Delegation sounds like fancy business school hooey that doesn’t work in the real world.”

If delegation didn’t work, Dwight Eisenhower would’ve had a busy D-Day. He would’ve had to personally steer every ship, fly every plane and fight the German army single-handed. He didn’t, because the military knows how to delegate.Delegation works and greatly magnifies the results you can achieve, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. The right way is called delegation. The wrong way is called abdication.

Abdication means telling an employee: “Take care of the Main Street job while I’m gone.” or “Make sure you handle all the estimates next week.”

These instructions sound harmless but they’re recipes for disaster. You know what you want to happen, but the instructions are vague and open to interpretation by the employees. “Aw, jeez, I thought you meant….” is a sure sign that you abdicated the task. If you leave room for even the brightest employees to interpret, assume or guess, there’ll be trouble.

Effective delegation means taking the time to spell out your expectations in detail.

Be excruciatingly clear: What, exactly, do you want as a result, when do you want it, how do you want it done and by whom? Don’t assume anything, and always err on the side of more detail. Write it down, get agreement up front.

Eliminate discretion: Discretion = variability = “Aw, jeez….” For each task you delegate, document the best practice (this is the “how you want it done” from above), and make it clear that employees are to follow the best practice every single time for a given task. Some employees won’t like this. That is, as we say, tough toodles.

“But that’s such a pain,” you say. “You mean I have to write it all down, step-by-step, every time I want someone else to do some work for me?” Not quite. Take the time once to document the process and desired result, and it’s done for that task. You can delegate that task again and again and know that you’ll get the same results. It’s a pain one time and makes life easier a hundred times afterwards. That’s part of the leverage.

“But I’ve got a hundred things I’d want to delegate. That means a hundred written processes.” Yes, but just twenty of your tasks probably take up 80 percent of your time. If you document those twenty you’ll be able to delegate 80 percent of your tasks and know that they’ll be done your way, on time, with no surprises. Imagine how that would feel! Even if you only document and delegate three or four of your biggest time-wasters, you’ll reclaim hours of every day.

Hard to do? Nope. We teach business owners how to effectively write processes and delegate every day, and they get great results every time because (surprise!) we have a clear, detailed process that covers all the bases. Follow the process, get the result. It requires some attention and effort, but it’s not difficult and doesn’t take long to produce results.

As an owner, you want your employees to do things a certain way and get a certain result, but without explicit instructions, employees will approach a task in many different ways and produce varying results. Effective delegation means getting knowledge out of your head and into a detailed written process that ensures things are done your way every time without you having to do them.

Cheers,

Jayme

Construction Business Owner, September 2007