The Three-Week Rule of Delegation

Robert Craft said: “I try to hire good people and let them do their job.” If only it were that easy…

Delegation is one of the most polarising words in the management language. Some personality types find it quite natural to delegate, others avoid it at all costs. Even if it comes naturally, it certainly doesn’t mean it is done well and successful outcomes result.  

Effective delegation is a journey and is more rapidly enabled through a deliberate and structured approach. There is no secret - just diligence, discipline and self-awareness. Like most things management. Here is my tried and tested process:    

Round out your team like an executive

You’ve done your executive heatmapping. You know where the capability, profile and technical gaps are on your team. You’re hiring for the role across a more holistic set of factors to bring the right credentials, experience, thinking, action and feeling approach to the team.

Onboard the mind

You need to intensively think WITH your team members, team leads and managers in your / their first 6 months on the job. It is imperative that you unpack problems and solve for solutions TOGETHER, joined at the hip, at a whiteboard, thinking out loud. This way, your team member can see how you approach problems, the angles you take and want them to take and how you look at THEIR world relative to them. Conversely, it’s important for you to see how your team member approaches and thinks about their space. What is their natural inclination and where are the blindspots. You need to proactively coach those blindspots out of them in the first 6 months. Intensively.

Then align mentally

And those you cannot, you need to put in place structural mechanisms to allow them to be effective in spite of their blindspots. Explicitly:

“Tom, we’ve seen over the last 4 months that I keep needing to bring the finance angle to our problem solving. We need to think about a way to cover that angle without me being in every problem solving with you.”

Even a simple post-it note on their laptop that says “Circle proposals with Colin from Accounts before submitting” or “Think about how this impacts support” – you get the point. If you can “see inside each other’s minds”, you can supply post-its that will talk for you and that they will listen to!

Answer questions carefully

Knowing what questions to answer and what questions not to answer is a critical management tool. Getting this wrong can have significant consequences on your ability to manage and the culture you drive. Your “question answering strategy” MUST align with your delegation strategy.

I worked in / with a small business that was struggling to grow. Shortly after I joined them, I was talking to a Manager about a mid-year function for 20 odd sales staff. Something pretty standard and important in sales organisations. The Manager informed me that they did not have any clear budget for such things and any expenditure over $200 had to be cleared by the CEO.

Now, I was certain they were mistaken. They had a missed a zero or something. So I walked over to the finance department (one person) and enquired about this policy. I’ll admit, I was young and relatively poorly filtered in those days. When I was informed that the policy was in fact $200 – I scoffed and exclaimed that it was madness! No CEO in the world should be paid to sign off on $200 cost items.

I really knew how much trouble we were in when an hour later the Finance Manager stormed into my office and barked: “How dare you?! Who do you think you are?!?! Walk in here and just start shooting down our policies and ….”. I stopped listening but nodded and looked appropriately chastised. It was clear that I wasn’t going to have to rip a band-aid off – I was amputating the arm.

This is a perfect example of the wrong people answering the wrong questions. Having to ask the CEO for $200 is disempowering, unstructured, and just plain inefficient. It symbolised a management culture holding the executive, managers and the business back.

Yes, there are many questions you CAN answer. But, at this point in our journey, only a small few you SHOULD answer. And any question you feel you should answer should first have a proposed answer from the relevant manager(s) around you!

So, which questions should you answer?

Weigh in strategically

The only questions that you should weigh in heavily on would be questions that have:

-        a material impact on the strategy of the team and business

-        a material, high-probability risk angle that the team hasn’t considered

-        cross-functional impact or an element of abstract reasoning beyond the teams’ scope of reference

i.e., very few after you have effectively onboarded and mentally aligned the team member.

If it’s more than that – do the work and fix it.

Course correct gently

So, what about making their answer better? Am I just a spectator now?

No. You’re not a spectator. You are now a Facilitative Leader. You should be drawing on your Facilitative Consulting toolkit[1] to balance asking and telling effectively. You now accepting good enough answers and coaching your team members on answers that need a bit more refinement. You’re guiding them, not managing them. In order to build and maintain both…

Confidence and competence

Effective delegation is equal parts competence and confidence. So, once your team has the capabilities and thinking to do the job effectively – let them. Recognize and acknowledge them. Even recognition of good enough. Confident good enough eventually leads to cautious innovation, and so forth.

The Three Week Rule

All this leads us to my Three Week Rule: you should be able to go away for three weeks, without your laptop, and nothing tactical should be held up as result.

I have routinely gone away to remote places in South East Asia and Africa with no wifi. On multiple Africa trips, we could only get 3G mobile service at 10pm at night when the earths radiation didn’t interfere with the signal. And I used that 3G signal to check in with my dog-sitter, not my managers.

How does this help you? Book a three week holiday. Or start with two. Or just imagine one. Get hypothetically hit by a bus. Do the assessment with your team. What would fall over? What would stop working? What process would be held up?

Then solve that.

And if you can’t, start at step 1 and reassess your executive heatmap!

Be an executive manager and build a team you can delegate to. Then go on a three week holiday.

[1] Research the McKinsey Ask-Tell matrix when you have a gap