What is a good succession plan?

I find it  interesting is that most companies do one of two extremes when it comes to succession planning:

1.  Nothing at all
2. A very cumbersome process with lots of documents and checkpoints for multiple candidates which never amounts to anything.

Let’s find something in the middle…

Get someone ready

Think about succession planning in its core form:  How do you get someone (specific), ready to take your (specific) job?

Every manager should be thinking about this.

The benefits are numerous.  If you do this,  as a leader you score many wins:

• The whole organization gets more capable
• You have a real and meaningful way of motivating your top performers
• Other people see you delegating some power, so they trust you more
• You get to hand off some hard work that you don’t have to do personally!

3  Steps to effective delegating

Succession planning is all about delegating.

As a leader, you need to make sure you have someone on your team that can step up.  Once you do, you need to be prepared to delegate big, hairy, strategic stuff, not just superficial, well contained, safe stuff.

1. Let them practice your work

The first part of someone learning your job, is about the work.  You need to give them opportunities to practice working at your level.

A lot of times we think the way to motivate our top performers is to have them work on the most fun or interesting projects.  That works to a point, but it does not do anything to help get someone ready for your job.

Face it, how much fun work do YOU get to do?

You need to give them opportunities to practice the ugly, mind-numbing, heavily matrixed, controversial, boring, unsupported, failing, no-win kind of work you deal with every day when you wake up.

What is the hardest and most distasteful thing you own?

That’s what you give your top performer.  You give them the benefit of seeing what it is really like in your shoes.

They get to suffer like you do.  But they get to work on big stuff. They get access to your network and stakeholders.  They have the chance to do something creative and heroic to get this done.

What may be drudgery for you, can be really motivating for someone who gets to step up.  OK, you should probably give them a more pleasant task too, while you are at it…

But don’t shy away from giving smart people hard work.

And don’t feel guilty about it.  (I often did, but then realized that this was better for everybody, and that people appreciate it, not resent it, so I got over it)

2. Let them practice your relationships

The next part of getting someone ready for your job is to make sure they are practiced and comfortable with the social requirements at the next level.

If they are stepping up, they need to fit in socially too.

They need to be someone that your peers want to include personally. They can’t stand out like a sore thumb as the junior person in the room,  who has no basis for relating to the big execs.

You need to give your top performer a chance to practice at these relationships.  Give them opportunities to present for you. Arrange one-one meetings with them and your peers.  Send them as your delegate to your boss’s staff meeting when you are out of town.  (Go out of town if this never happens.)

If your succession candidate does not develop personal relationships with your boss and peers they will never be ready to step into your job.  And it won’t matter because they will not be given the chance.

Unless your candidate is viewed by your boss and peers as someone socially worthy of the role, they won’t get it.  So your succession planning will fail. Either you will be stuck, or the company will go outside to fill your role when the time comes.

3. Let them practice your decisions

OK. Here is where the rubber meets the road.  You need to give someone a chance to practice making the decisions that you make.

If you never delegate important decisions you are fooling yourself that you are doing succession planning.

How will somebody ever be ready to take over, if you have owned all the decisions along the way?

Will you delegate important decisions?

Think about the next few months of decisions you need to make.  Investments, priorities, partnerships, road map choices, marketing strategies.  Give your top performer the task of owning the project AND the making decisions.

Let them feel the pressure of owning the outcome fully.  Let them get the experience explaining, defending, and selling their choices. Let them get the experience fixing it if it goes wrong.

Is this scary? Yes.

Might they choose wrong? Yes.  Might they choose better than you? Yes.

The point is, if you never let them own and make key decisions, you are cutting off the single most important training you can give your successor.
See also Let People Fail.  They will never be ready for your job without this.

Thanks

This topic of succession planning came up in a discussion the other day in one of my member Coaching Hour calls.  Thank you to the Azzarello Group members for making the discussions so valuable.

Your Job

Your job description is not a life sentence – you can change it.  You need to change it.

If you want to make more progress in your career, (and suffer less along the way), you need to rethink how you work.

I had an opportunity to speak about this at the Design Automation Conference in Anaheim this week, to the Women in Electronic Design Group.

My talk was on Managing your Career on Purpose.

Add value to the business

Something that has been on my mind lately is how important it is, for people at any level, to take control of re-defining their job so they can put themselves in a position to add more value to the business.

The only reliable way to advance your career is to understand what the business needs and make sure your work is impacting it.

Working hard is not enough

In fact, working too hard, trying to do everything that is asked of you, is what gets you stuck.  You need to understand what the business values, and then tune your  job to deliver more value, not just deliver more work.

You need to refuse to burn your time, energy, and career capital working too hard, the wrong way, on the wrong things.

What I find really interesting about this when I work with companies, is this gaping disconnect:

• The Employees: When I talk to the employees and mid-level managers, they tell me they feel like they are working themselves to death, and their work is not being appreciated or recognized.
  .
• The Executives: Then when I talk to the executive management, they tell me that they are frustrated that their people are stuck in the details and not stepping up to deliver at a higher level of value, and failing to drive the strategy forward.
  .

What this implies, is that improving your career is not just good for you. It’s good for your company.  They are waiting for you to step up.

The secret:

• Your management doesn’t just want you to do what they ask of you.
• They want you to do the job that needs to be done, not just the one they gave you.

.
Think about it this way.  If your job as a manager was just to get your team to do everything that is asked of you, your manager wouldn’t need you.  They could just assign all the work directly to your team.

You need to change the game

You need to catch all the work, but not try to do it all as it comes across the table at you.  You need to step above it, analyze it, sift through it, prioritize it, and recommend a better way to do it.

Your management wants you to think strategically about the workload that is dumped on you.  It’s up to you to figure out how to change the game, figure out what the most important stuff is, and find the best way to do it.

Don’t wait to be asked

The people who figure this out and do it without being asked or instructed to do so are the ones whose careers advance.

They are not burned out, working tirelessly, without recognition, on everything.  They have figured out a way to be less busy, but add more value to the business.

Good for business

From the perspective of the business, having more people and managers who are personally motivated and capable to step up, the better the business strategy will be executed.

Execution stalls happen when managers and employees are so overwhelmed with activities and demands of their current jobs, that they don’t even have time to think about how to do things in a better way, or implement a new strategy.

Stepping Up

Make sure you know what it means to lead at the right level and manage talent and team performance, not just projects and work output.  Increase the reach and breadth and significance of your impact.

Communicate better.  Build a strong network of support.  Delegate better, and always raise the bar.  You need to step up and pull your people up. It is what your business is expecting of you.

Individuals:  If you’d like some help to step up, check out these resources.

Executives:  If you’d like to discuss how to give your managers tools and support to step up, contact me:

In a struggling economy, companies are asking employees to go without raises and bonuses.

Why humans work

Do your employees get angry and check out? Or do they keep working hard with little to no cash incentive to do so?

The good news is that humans work for more reasons than money — and money is not even at the top of the list.

What is at or near the top of the list for people is to feel like their work matters, that it counts for something.

The companies who create meaning for the work keep their employees engaged and productive through the business downturns.

Companies that do not go the extra mile to create meaning, have a workforce doing as little as possible.  I see this often.  It is a shame for everyone involved, including the shareholders.

People want their work to matter

I was preparing to write this blog about how to make work more meaningful for people, when I heard a piece of an interview with Dan Ariely about his new book, The Upside of Irrationality.

I didn’t hear the whole interview, but he talked about a test he did to measure how important meaning was in one’s work. The test was to complete a task repeatedly, until you wanted to stop.

The task was to build a Lego robot.

When you completed it, you got asked if you would like to build another robot.

In one case the robot you built was placed to the side so you could admire it while you built the next one.

In the other case if you said you’d like to build another, they dis-assembled the one you just built right in front of you,  gave you back the pieces and said, OK build another one.

How to drain all meaning out of someone’s work

I’m sure I am doing a dis-service to Dan Ariely’s work by taking this out of context, but that is one of the best metaphors I have heard for taking the meaning out of someone’s work!

It got me to thinking, what are all the ways we drain meaning from our employees work, dis-assemble their robots right before their eyes, mabye even without recognizing we are doing it?  And how can we build up the meaning instead?

1. Changing your mind all the time

Someone completes something you said was really important, but you changed your mind since you first assigned the task.  Now instead of accepting the work and thanking them, you gloss over it and ask them to do something else instead.   Then later you change your mind again, maybe even back to the first thing.

Robot parts are flying at this point!

Let people finish things.  Don’t keep switching the task before people can complete things.  Consider the full cost of changing your mind.  If you really have to change your mind, don’t skip the closure.

Thank people for the work, and communicate a reason why THEIR work still counts,  even though YOU have changed your mind.

2. Not accepting something different than you do it

Be careful here, just because it isn’t like you would do it, doesn’t mean that it’s not good enough, or maybe even better.

Build the robot again, but this time use the blue legos for the feet and the red ones for the arms because that is how I do it.

You are far more likely to create meaning if you accept good work, than if you tweak it to death just to make it exactly like you would do it.

3. Skipping the closure

The urgent customer issue or demand has disappeared because you either won the deal or lost the deal. The team has been working frantically to produce or defend something.

When you no longer feel the urgency, you either forget to call off the team, so they keep working round the clock — oops!   Or you just never go back to collect the work, because it no longer matters to you.

Just because it no longer has meaning for you and you have moved on to other things, doesn’t mean you should take the meaning away from the people that did the work.

Save the robot as a resource

If the work is no longer necessary, close out the project, thank them, and have a quick brainstorming about how we can use this important work for another customer or to solve a general issue.

It’s so much easier to just move on to your next urgent thing, but you are sacrificing your team’s motivation an ongoing performance and support if you skip this step.

4. Not being clear about the strategy

This is probably the biggest and most common hazard I have seen.

Companies are fuzzy about what their strategy is.  But they demand lots of hard work from people, and it is utterly impossible to understand if the work matters to the strategy or not.

Unclear strategy causes lots of wasted time and energy working on the wrong things, or waiting for decisions to be made, but it is really de-motivating for people to deliver work into a strategic black hole.

That is like throwing their robots directly into the trash can.

Make the strategy clear.  It’s what creates meaning for the work.
See also: Uncertainty is Expensive

5. Not connecting the dots for people

Even if the strategy is clear to you, don’t expect your staff to automatically see how their work fits into supporting the big picture.

You need to spell it out and show them why their work matters. If you never connect the dots about how their work specifically supports the over-all strategy, there is no meaning in it for them.

Otherwise, they are just putting their robots on a conveyor belt to be used for unknown purposes.

Ensuring that all your employees understand how the business works, and how their work helps move it forward, motivates and enables them make better decisions and add more value.

With our without financial rewards your employees will do better work, faster, if they can personally see why it matters.

Hidden Expense…

Uncertainty is a huge hidden expense in your business.

There’s the obvious expense of work not getting done — as uncertainty causes people waiting for decisions instead of working.

But the more damaging and expensive side of uncertainty is the work that gets done the wrong way.

The wrong work

Unresolved strategic issues, don’t just stay in the board room until you finally get them answered.

Every unanswered strategic question leaves legions of people in your organization, less productive and more expensive than they would be with clear direction.

It’s the inconsistent work that comes from everyone taking their best guess while waiting for the strategy from above, that is expensive.

As a leader one of your biggest responsibilities is to remove uncertainty.

Strategic Chaos

What are the unresolved strategic issues in your company?  What are the decisions that are never seem to get closed?

Are we a product or service company? Should we do an exclusive agreement?  Should we be selling through different partners?  Should we upgrade our architecture, or build on the one we have?  Should we change our pricing for global customers or optimize regionally?

The cost of indecision…

It’s not that strategic unanswered questions go answered that causes the problem. It’s that they get answered every day, differently, by front line employees who are making the best choices they can in the moment for how to implement their work.

A tale of 2 business units

An interesting example of this is a company I worked with that had two business units.  At the executive level, it was a political war.

They could not commit to a decision if one or the other business unit was the primary mission of the company, or if both businesses should get equal attention and investment.

So what happened…

Hundreds of front line, individual contributors had to wonder, debate and make up their own answer to the most strategic decision in the company: What business are we in?

Customer-facing, unsupported strategy…

A specific, downstream effect of this was that every trade show event manager had signs for both businesses in their inventory.  So they each had to decide on their own, Do we hang one sign or both?  Do we make one bigger? Put one on top? Or give them equal treatment?

They all did their best, but of course they all made different decisions.  And different local politics ensured that the company was never represented the same way twice!

Because the executives left this uncertainty, the most fundamental positioning of the company was executed differently at every event.

Failure to build value, and wasted time and money…

The company shot them selves in the foot at every event, failing to build their credibility and recognition consistently in the market.

Your job is to eliminate uncertainty, so that everyone can invest in executing in an aligned way, to build value, market confidence and brand.

This is true for every function and every team in the organization. And this has a huge ROI.  Failure has a huge expense.

How much uncertainty is in your organization?

This is at the heart of the work I do with my corporate clients.  Create clarity, concrete actions and motivation both at the executive level AND with all of the employees.

If you want to talk about the execution challenges across your organization,
contact me.  I’d be interested to hear what you are facing, and would be happy to share some ideas with you.

I have been writing a lot recently about the work I do in helping companies identify and deal with execution risks.

Wait it out…

One of the biggest issues companies are facing today is that people are simply not in the game.

They are keeping their heads down, waiting for the rest of the shoes to drop, and for the dust to clear.

So people are not engaging. Execution stalls.

What is more risky?

The interesting part about this, is that employees do this not because they are lazy, but because they think it is a safer, job-preserving tactic, than engaging with a new, risky initiative.

With so much change happening, they are afraid if they jump on board, visibly, they will become a target, when the next change happens.  It’s safer to just lay low, and stay off the radar.

Frustrated leaders always ask me:

• How do I get them to engage?
• How can I get them to start working in the new way?
• How can I get them leading, being a positive example for others?
• How can I get them communicating more?
• How can I get them to share their opinions?

First, a stable environment

As leaders, what we need to do is to help people understand that it is actually more risky to be invisible than it is to be engaged.

But first, you owe it to your team to create a stable environment.  You need to remove uncertainty about what people should be working on.  You need to not change your mind all the time, and not change the strategy every month.  It’s not fair to expect them to engage in chaos.

As long as you do this you can encourage your people to step up.

DEBATE or GO?

Debate

One of the best ways I have done this is to make it clear that for every initiatve, there is DEBATE Time and there is GO time.  During debate time, I make it clear that I want to hear people’s opinions.  I want to hear the arguments.  I want everyone to fight for  their point of view.

Decision

After debate time is over, I make it clear who owns the decision, and the decision gets made.

GO Time

Then I make it clear that we are in GO time.  This is the time to engage in the work, not in the debate.

By setting this structure, you can make it clear that expected behavior is to not be invisible during debate time, and to not be invisible during go time.  You want to hear opinions, and then you want to see active engagement on the decided course of action.

Invisible is not acceptable

Make it clear that being invisible in not acceptable in either phase,  and is actually a riskier behavior than jumping in.  You need to imply, if not outright communicate, if there were a need to do layoffs, it would be the invisible people who are not engaged who would be at most risk.

Make it feel real

People are more likely to participate in the GO phase if they have participated in the DEBATE phase.  It’s not just that they have more ownership, which also helps.  It’s that they have participated in the socialization of the idea.

It’s not just some fringe idea that is going to go by the wayside, so it’s not worth getting involved in – better to wait it out.

They get the feeling that this is a real thing, that everyone is involved with. SO it will be OK for me to.  I don’t want to get left out.

Getting Clear

As I work with management teams who want to successfully execute a change…

Or to get their organization to step up to a more strategic or scalable way of working…

They often tell me, this is not a new idea, but we need to make it stick this time.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately – Why is it so hard to get organizations to stop doing what they are currently doing, and to start doing what the need to be doing?

Here’s the thought: Clarity is the secret sauce for execution, but clarity causes conflict, and most people don’t like conflict. So execution stalls.

Comfort with conflict

You need to be comfortable with the fact that creating real clarity is going to expose disagreements. It’s going to expose gaps. It’s going to expose things that you need to deal with.

It can be much more comfortable to just leave everything fuzzy so you don’t actually have to address these things. This is one of the key reasons why so many change initiatives fail.

Clarity gives you the specific trail map to success

Any successful business agenda or initiative needs a tremendous amount of clarity to succeed. First you need to be really clear about the desired outcome. What is expected?

Then:

• You need to break that big goal down clearly into smaller, concrete parts
• You need to be clear about who is responsible for each piece
• You need to be clear about how each piece is resourced
• You need to be clear about what doing something different in each case means to the old way of doing something.
• You need to be clear about how the roles of specific people change
• You need to be clear about not only what the new tasks and deliverables are, but what are the new behaviors and values that are expected at each level.
• You need to be clear about how the success of each role will be measured.
• You need to be clear about what the consequences are for not doing the new thing
• You need to be clear about what will be communicated.
  .

But getting clarity on any one of these points opens the door to conflict.

For example if you say: We need to improve the quality of our products. The priority of the next product release is quality.

That may sound like a clear statement, but…

• Does that mean that you will hire new people for testing?
• Does that mean that you will include customer testing earlier in the process?
• Does that mean that you will measure the performance of the engineers differently? How so?
• Will you re-rate the priority of all the bugs in the system? Or just some of them? Under what criteria?
• Does that mean that you will stick to your quality plan when the sales force is clamoring for new features?
  .

Or if you say: We need to sell higher up in organizations

• Does that mean that you expect every rep to spend some time on strategic deal making? How much time? Doing what, exactly?
• How will you engage customers differently? Are people trained to do that? Who will be trained?
• How will you measure if it is happening? What will you do it if isn’t?
• Or does that mean that you will split the team into tactical and strategic teams?
• Will you change the comp plans of the sales team?
• Will you create new product/solution offers to appeal at a higher level?
  .

Discussing the answer to all these kinds of questions out loud, with your team, opens the door to conflict.

Once you get really clear, people will not agree.

But that’s the important part.

That means you are doing it right

As I bring teams through this process of getting real clarity, taking the time to hear the opinions and debate, we reach a point where everyone can see what to do differently, specifically.

It becomes clear what everyone needs to do personally to achieve the big goal. Everyone leaves knowing exactly what is expected, and how they will be measured on what they do moving forward.

Being Fuzzy – the comfortable hazard

If you are not clear enough to cause and then work through conflict, I call this being fuzzy. Being fuzzy may be more comfortable in the moment but it causes several problems.

• Nothing changes.
• People go back to whatever they were doing before because they clearly know what that is. They don’t know specifically what they need to do, to do the new thing.
• When the outcome doesn’t happen, you can’t put your finger on what isn’t working, because you never defined exactly what “working” looks like.
• If people are not performing you can’t do performance management because you haven’t defined the expectations clearly enough to show the gap.
• If you can’t show the gap, you can’t get people to cross it
  .

Don’t settle for shallow team pleasantness, or avoid performance management at the expense of getting your business strategy implemented.

As a leader you need to create clarity and navigate through the conflict it causes, if you want to get anything important done.

10 IDEAS FROM THE WEBINAR:

LEADING CHANGE

Download the PODCAST to learn:

Your job as change leader

1. Change is not just for big, special occasions. You always need to think about leading change even when it is not forced upon you.  Leading change is key to getting important things done, and to build capability in your team over time — otherwise you are standing still.

2.  Change is not complete after the planning and the announcement. The hard part is making it stick.  We talked through 6 hazards to successful change.  What problems arise? What leadership approaches are required to overcome them them to create new expectations, behaviors and habits?

Six Hazards to Successful Change

3. Lack of Concreteness – Big Goals may  feel good and sound exciting but leave staff wondering what to do exactly…  We talked about how break down big goals into clear, tangible action plans.

4.  Lack of Real Agreement – Sometimes it’s passive aggressive, sometimes it’s outright dissent, but more often everyone “agrees” with good intentions.  The problem is that they just don’t realize that everyone has a different impression of what was agreed to.  Action breaks down.

5. Hard to Stop what you are currently doing. The gravity and momentum of the current workload is very strong.  We talked about how to motivate action on new priorities to help break free of the status quo, and start progressing on the new stuff.

6.  Having the guts to stick with it. What do you do when urgent requests come in, maybe even from your boss, that throw your strategic agenda off course?  How do you respond?  This is probably the most challenging aspect of all.

7.   Inconsistent Communication. The default is that people think you are not serious… Just wait it out, this change will go away.  You need to communicate a lot  about the new behaviors you expect.  We talked about the difference between communication and socialization of ideas to make them stick.

8.  People are not capable. If you are raising the bar, not everyone may be able to clear it. We talked about how to assess your team relative to the change and have a fair and clear plan to deal with people who do not make the cut.

Clarity invites conflict

9. A theme throughout the session was the importance of clarity. Many change agendas fail because clarity opens the door to conflict.  So people who are not comfortable with conflict avoid it by keeping expectations and measures fuzzy.  Fuzzy prevents change from sticking, because you can’t measure and enforce anything specific.

Worksheets and Templates

10. The Leading Change Worksheets for this session include tools for:

• Actions: Breaking down big goals into clear measurable tasks
• Roles: Defining behaviors and expectations for new roles
• Communication: My magic timeline tool, to make sure change sticks.

.

How YOU can Lead Change More Effectively

• Download the PODCAST for details on what to do and how to do it.
• Download the  WORKSHEETS to plan your specific actions and communications.
• Download the Career Year of Action Guide to help you use your time better.
  Give yourself the time to do what is necessary beyond your job description to be successful.

Browse the Member Library

Browse the member library for more podcasts, worksheets and tools to:

* Be a Better Leader
* Be More Effective
* Build your Network
* Get a Better Job
* Grow your Business

All downloads are FREE to members.

• Learn about Membership
• Become a Member

.

There are many reasons that good strategies fail.

They range from, poor communication, lack of alignment, difficulty with change, underestimating resources required, failing to train people, running out of time…

But at the heart of all these things is:

How much do your employees care?

If your employees don’t personally care about what you are trying to do, it’s not likely to get done well, on time, or at all.

Give your people a reason to care

Here’s a good example:

The dreaded Mission Statement

You are probably already rolling your eyes at the thought of this…

This can become one of the most draining, irritating, and lame activities you can engage a management team in, and often results in a statement that reads something like:

To be the leading provider of the most innovative products in our space, with outstanding customer service, and the most efficient operations, therefore maximizing shareholder value.

OK employees…Now, hop to it!  (yeah, right.)

The trick is to actually care

If you want a mission that employees care about and can act on, the trick is to start with something you actually care about.

When I work with management teams on this, we start with the question “What do you personally care about?  Why are you here?”

Your employees will never care if your executives don’t.

Your team won’t care if you don’t.

You don’t need to call it a mission statement, but you do need to stand for something and care about something for real, if you want your people to spring into action, solve problems for you and drive the momentum you need in your business.

1. Define your strategy in terms people CAN care about.

If you care about customer service and believe that it is a competitive advantage then say so, and ask for help.

We are going to provide a level of personalized customer service for our products that is so good that our customers are shocked by it. We believe this is our key competitive opportunity.  Providing outrageous levels of service compared to the industry will grow our business, and we will be profitable doing it.

Now you can ask your employees to start solving this puzzle for you.

It gives them something dig into.  It gives them a way to engage.  It gives them something that they can care about too.

2. Talk about why you are here.

Why, personally are you here? at this company? in this organization? What are you trying to do?  Why does it matter to you? What are your values as a leader and as a human?

If you are willing to share your core values, your employees will care more.

You are giving them a basis to support you.  When they talk about work at the dinner table, YOU are the company, much more than anything else is.

If you stand for something they can care about, they will care.  If you only ever talk about projects and schedules, there is nothing for them to personally connect with or care about.

3. Talk about what excellence means to you, and why?

What is it that makes you proud of what you and your team delivers?  What is most important to YOU that your business stands for and shows the world?

Is it innovation? is it service?  is it quality? is it an externally validated proof that you are the best? What embarrasses you?  What do you believe is wrong that other companies do?  Why?

If you want your employees to step up, they need to understand why it matters.

So many managers struggle to get their employees to work at the same level of competence and quality that they personally deliver.  Your employees will never care about rising to your level of excellence unless you really show them why it’s personally important to you to operate at this level of excellence.

What if you don’t care?

If you don’t really care about your work or your company, if you are only there because you need the money, remember, while they are paying you, it is your job to lead, so it is your job to find  something you can care about.

If you don’t like the product, care about the way the company treats people.  If you don’t care about the company, care about the customers.

I’ve been here.  Believe me.  It’s better to find something to care about than it is to check out.  You are way more likely to get yourself into a better job later, (and maintain your sanity) if you keep caring about something along the way.

If you don’t genuinely care about something, you employees will not deliver for you.

Your strategy can be great, but if your employees don’t give a damn, your chances of executing go out the window.

Most people inherently know that they should delegate more, and delegate better, but one big obstacle keeps them from doing it…

It might not come out right

…so I better jump in and make sure
it is going OK or just do it myself.

Who’s at fault?

It it doesn’t come out right, the uncomfortable question this raises is -
did this person fail to do a good job because:

1. They are not good enough at the job? or
2. I am not good enough at delegating?

It’s not about getting comfortable with worry

The real secret of successful delegating is not to learn how to deal with the emotional discomfort of letting go, and learning to live with being worried about the outcome, or accepting bad outcomes…

It’s about preventing reasons to worry

Your job is to delegate, let go, NOT micromanage… AND create structure, support and processes so you ensure that it is going to get done right.

You don’t deal with the worrying, you ensure it’s not necessary.

Ways to build comfort and insurance into the project
without micro-managing

1. Let the person create the timeline, define the deliverables and how you will measure them.  The encouragement and trust goes a long way, and you either get the pleasant surprise of a better plan than you would have come up with, or you get an early warning that this person needs more support.

2. Tighten the Outcomes.  If you are concerned that the person is not capable enough to run with the project, Instead of a 6 month outcome, discuss outcomes that occur every two weeks.

3. Focus on the outcome, not the activity. No two humans will do a task exactly the same way.  If they deliver the outcome, it shouldn’t matter how they do it.  Let them worry about how and what.  You worry about WHY, and what needs to be true when it is done.

4. Create an actual process and tracking system for long term or repetitive tasks – a software development lifecycle with checkpoints is a good example.  But why not define a project lifecycle with checkpoints for a quarterly analyst presentation, a press release, or a marketing campaign?

5. Third party reviews. Get yourself out of the position of always being the one to judge whether a deliverable is good enough or not.  Get the actual consumers of the deliverable to review and provide feedback.  Your employees will learn far more this way.

6. Don’t forget to inspect and measure things along the way.  If you set up a timeline with review steps along the way, you must follow up.  A great deal of your comfort comes from the fact that people take you seriously and actually do the committed work.  A long time mentor of mine always put it “You get what you INspect, not what you EXpect”.

7. Teach. When you are delegating things you are personally good at, always think of delegating as a teaching opportunity. If you need to sometimes jump down and do the work yourself, make sure someone is watching and learning.
See also Let People Fail.

Bottom line…

You need to delegate effectively if you want to get anything significant done, get anywhere in your career, and save yourself from an un-doable workload.

If you are either doing the work yourself, or worried about the work not getting done, you need to change your strategy.

You can delegate and feel comfortable that the work is getting done as long as you do the higher level work of setting up the systems, processes and measures that ensure the right things are happening along the way.

Note to the micromanaged…

I will write another post on this because many people suffer from this.

But the short answer is, you need make your boss comfortable that he will get what he wants in some way other than by micromanaging.   Some of the techniques above can be useful with your boss too.

Category Note: I filed this post under “CONNECT Better” because it is critical to always be building a broad base of support. Getting your team and others to accomplish work that you need done is a critical element of business effectiveness and career success.

.
My big point about delegating is that it as not just assigning work.

Effective delegating is about making sure the right work gets done at the right level, and making your team more capable.

Building capability requires learning

And there is no learning as great as that which comes after failing.

Many managers treat delegating exactly the opposite – that their role is to prevent failure — to watch closely, to jump in and take over, fix, or modify — if it is not going well.

If you think about this from a learning perspective, what you have just done is to ensure that no real learning occurs.

Think about the alternative.  Throwing someone in the deep end…

Don’t take away the motivation to learn

When you fail it feels bad.  It is embarrassing, it causes business problems, it causes trouble for other people.  So it becomes a big personal motivator to fix it!

Real learning occurs when you not only see what you did wrong, but need to live with, and deal with the consequences of what you did wrong.  If you take away the pain of failing, you also take away the big, highly personal, motivator to get it right.

Don’t take away the lesson of how to succeed

By creating the safety net, and filling in all the hard parts for them, they never really experience what it means to succeed.

But if you let a smart person fail, they will figure it out.

Isn’t that how you got good at what you do?  By doing it.  Trial and error.  Feedback. Tying again?   They will learn how to really do it if you give them a chance.

If they never learn, you never build capability, and you get stuck working evening and weekends to “cover” for the fact that your team is not capable of the work it needs to deliver.

Don’t put limits on learning

Also, if you always step in you are ensuring that they will never get any better at the task then you are.

You are putting an artificial cap on their development.

I have often delegated things that I thought I was pretty good at, and had my employee blow me away with their ability to exceed my capabilities. 

This to me is one of the best parts of management.  When you can say, Wow, that’s amazing. You did that better than I ever imagined it could be done.  Bravo. Thank You.  Look at this new capability my team now has!!

If you are threatened by the thought of your employees being better than you, don’t be.  You will get more points for breeding star performers than you will ever get for work you do personally.  Read this.

Fail Small or Fail Big

OK. so admittedly this is a bit of a paradox — how do you succeed when your people are failing?

Think ahead to the desired outcome.  Today your team can’t do the work as well as you can, so you have two choices.  Do it yourself and prevent your team from growing, or take some risk in the short term, and in a year from now have a team that can do more than you ever imagined.

Pick your battles

Don’t pick the most business critical deliverable and put it with the most junior person.  But do pick a meaty task and let a smart person who can learn something run with it.  Always be on the lookout for opportunities to let people own outcomes and learn in the process.

Not everything important is mission critical.

It is your job to manage all the outcomes so that you create the space and opportunity for people to fail, learn, succeed and grow, while at the same time managing the overall outcome to create success. 

Here are some ideas.

Trust People

You will be amazed at how far some trust and encouragement goes.  (as compared to micromanaging).  Set a really clear desired outcome for the task, and then ask them to give you a plan which includes checkpoints and what you will measure them on to ensure progress.

This encouragement and trust gives them huge ownership in making it happen. They will be personally motivated to try harder than if you try and control everything along the way.

Create judges and review boards

If you are concerned that the deliverables are not going to be good enough, arrange some review boards instead of always picking apart people’s work personally.  If someone is creating a marketing campaign, have one of the measures be that 3 of the most cranky, difficult sales people have to say it’s OK before they bring it to you. 

That is a very practical, contained failure opportunity, which will help the person learn way more than you saying, it’s not good enough, let me fix it.

Create smaller, intermediate outcomes

If you are too concerned that a failure will be too big, pick a smaller objective and a target closer in so that you can see if things are on track or not.  Giving someone a set of sequential outcomes and challenges to pursue is far more motivating than spelling out every activity and packing their lunch every day.  Let them fly solo on shorter flights then help pick up the pieces only when necessary.

Always teach

You may think that letting someone fail is more discouraging and de-motivating than preventing it.  But just think about yourself.  How do you feel when your manager starts doing your job for you? or tells you that you’re not doing it right?   Is that more motivating than being given the space to figure things out for yourself, and really learn.

When someone fails — offer to answer questions and provide support, but have them own the learning process.

You can re-iterate the goals and continue to clarify the outcome.  You can answer questions about or even comment on the fact that there is a gap between what they produced and the agreed desired outcome.  But make their job to fix it and get it right.

If you are the one to fix it — you will always be the one to fix it. 

You will be stuck and you will have failed BIG by not leading a team capable of the work that needs to get done.

Next Up on Delegating…

In a couple of weeks I will post another article on creating more ways to feel comfortable that delegating (and letting go) will create a successful outcome.  You own the outcome.

Delegating better is not about being willing to be uncomfortable about a successful outcome –  it is about creating a system to let go of the detail, yet stay comfortable that the outcome will be achieved.

More Resources on Delegating:

Delegate or Die: 10 Ideas (plus webinar/podcast)
Addiction to Detail
Building Capacity