Effective Delegation

Delegation is critical to being exponentially more effective by utilizing a team to accomplish greater things. Depending on how delegation is setup, it can require massive amounts of management supervision, or it can establish a person to manage themselves in a win-win arrangement that is highly effective.

Continuing our journey with the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People we learn that part of Habit 3, “First Things First” and Habit 4 “Win-Win”, is about choosing what to spend our time on to be more effective. We always delegate things we want to accomplish. We can categorize different delegation methods into three main methods known as “Time Delegation”, “Go For Delegation”, and “Stewardship Delegation”

“Time” Delegation

Delegating to time means that we do it ourselves. A lot of folks, including me, think they can do certain things better themselves. This may be true, sometimes it is not, but we feel that way. Obviously this consumes our time and does not scale. We also suffer from the lack of other people’s talents and perspectives.

“Go For” Delegation

In this method we delegate to others but ask them to do specific tasks and we “look over their shoulder” constantly to direct them or make sure they are on track. We manage in this way because we are concerned the person will not do the job well, will not do what we asked on time, or we think we can do it better. The term “Go For” comes from telling someone to go for this or go for that, i.e. controlling methods (how) as well as desired results (what). Its also known as micro managing.

Most people start with and have experienced “Go For” delegation because it is the most obvious and basic way to delegate. It not ideal because it consumes a lot of time to manage and direct a person being delegated to. The person being delegated to does not learn self management skills that would benefit them greatly. It sometimes feels like it takes more time to manage someone and “fix” things that they did, then to delegate to them in the first place.

This method is time consuming and does not scale. How many people can a manager delegate in this way? Maybe 4-5 at most?

There is another way where a manager can manage 50 to 100 people and get more effective results.

“Stewardship” Delegation

Stewardship delegation is based on the principle of win-win. Its based on the paradigm of appreciation, self awareness, imaginations, self conscious, and free will of other people.

Its a method of delegation where the person being delegated to is setup to manage themselves with clear goals, success criteria so they can judge their own success, and consequences (positive and negative) that will result.

Once a stewardship is setup and is working, the primary job of the manager is to work for the person being delegated to, to remove obstacles in their way. Its a win-win system. Both the manager and the person being delegated to are involved in determining this agreement. The person being delegated to, writes up the agreement. The manager gets a productive person and things that are important to the company getting done. The person being delegated to is involved with determining their own methods, success criteria, and judging themselves. They also get a clear understanding of the positive and negative consequences of their efforts.

Stewardship delegation is focused on results instead of methods. It gives people choice of methods and makes them responsible for results. It takes more time in the beginning but the results are well worth it.

How to setup a stewardship delegation?

Stewardship delegation requires clear understanding upfront about 5 areas.

1. Desired results – clear mutual understanding about what, not how, results, not methods. Spend time, be patient, have the person see it, describe it. Make a quality statement about what the results will look like and when they will be accomplished.
2. Guidelines – Define any parameters they should abide by. These should be as few as possible to avoid methods delegation. If you know the pitfall of a job, identify them and share them. But don’t tell them how to do the job. Keep the responsibility of results with them.
3. Resources – Tell the person what financial, human, and organizational resources are available to them.
4. Accountability – Setup standards of performance for evaluating the job and specific times these evaluations will take place.
5. Consequences – Specify what will happen as a result, both good and bad. These can be psychic (recognition), financial, different job assignments and natural consequences to the organization as a result.

Its usually best practice to have a person write the Stewardship Agreement in a “manager letter” and share with the manager. Then both the person and the manager can make sure everything is clear and understood.

With people who have less experience, specify fewer expected results, you can have more guidelines, identify more resources, and more frequent accountability checks. With people who are more experienced you can have more challenging results, fewer guidelines, and less frequent accountability checks.

It’s the job of the person to evaluate themselves and to do accountability checks with their manager during the times they specified in the agreement.

If you have not done Stewardship Delegation in this way before, like me :-), it will take some time to practice and tweak as you go. I’ve had experiences where I had capable people that managed themselves even without these kind of formal agreements (we had a different, less effective version). I can just imagine how much more effective and rewarding it could be to have such clear written Stewardship agreements up front.

Effective delegation is the best indicator of effective management because it is foundational for organization and personal growth. Working to improve that is very much a win-win.

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