Delegation, the Missing Essential

     Try this little experiment:
     Pick one of your most intelligent, trustworthy, responsive associates. Time yourself at five minutes in describing some function of yours that the person has never done or seen. Keep it verbal. Explain freely in response to the person’s questions but take no more than five minutes.
     Make it something of moderate complexity.
     Then remain silent and uninvolved as the person carries out the function. Neither person speaks and there is no other kind of communication. Do not set a hard-and-fast time limit for this phase.
     Take notes on what happens, especially at points where the person forgets or ignores your instructions, or adds/changes parts of the process.
     At a suitable point, stop the experiment and discuss with the other person what happened, and why. Perhaps the instruction was at fault, leaving out elements that were so second-nature to you that you never thought to include them. Ones your partner had no way to know exist.

How You Get to Trust

     “You’ve got to trust me on this one.” Confident voice, arm around the shoulders, the whole scene just like in the movies, until the response: “No, I don’t. No way I have to trust you.”
     That flat-out vote of no confidence did not come in a movie – it was a real-life business moment.
     The key word was “trust,” and that was the issue. Trust requires the surrender of your independent judgment to someone else. You’re a fool if you give very much of it without really believing you should. That’s why we rarely place total trust in another person.
     How much trust do you think we exercise every day, and in whom? We do it frequently, but usually in small doses. You couldn’t get through an intersection controlled by a three-phase traffic light if you didn’t think the cross-street drivers would really stop.
     Sometimes they don’t, so we enter intersections with caution. We limit our trust.
  

How We Delegate

     The boss sent me to a car dealership to collect an overdue debt.

     You know, of course, that you are not in the presence of naïvete when you’re at the car showroom. In this case, it also was not helpful that my purpose was to get the manager to part with cash for a service whose value had long since faded into a bygone time. The guy owed us for newspaper advertising we had published much earlier.

     Needless to say, I came back emptyhanded. “Well,” said the boss, “Did you ask them for use of a car, then?”

Don't Delegate? Can't Manage

“If you want something done right, do it yourself.”

     True or false?

     That depends. If you’re a champion individual contributor, it’s true as can be. If you’re trying to be a good manager, it’s profoundly false.

     It depends upon your definitions, too. What is the “something” in the saying, and what is meant by “done right.”?

     If you’re charged with performing a task yourself, then the measurement of successful completion of it arises from how well you performed the actions that produced the desired result. If you carried the work out in an excellent fashion, you’re a champ.

     If, on the other hand, you are responsible for having the task done and are given personnel to do that sort of thing, you’re failing to do your job if you do the work yourself. The fact that you might have done it superbly is irrelevant. It wasn’t your job to do the work – it was your job to see that someone else did it.

The Biggest, Sneakiest Project Risk

The accomplished engineer made no bones about it. “When I ask someone to do something,” he told a roomful of us, “I always do it myself as well, to make sure it gets done right.”

Got that? After delegating an assignment to someone, he would secretly duplicate the entire task himself because he trusted no one else to handle it properly. This was the triumph of personal perfectionism over everything we’ve all been saying about teamwork, delegation, personal productivity, staff development, supervisory responsibility. This was the ultimate failure of trust.

It’s an exaggerated example, but don’t kid yourself: It represents the major weakness of most projects. There is an implicit, general limit on expectations arising from our experience with our colleagues and managers. People often just don’t actually do what they say they’re going to do, and we adjust our estimates accordingly.

Getting People to Do Stuff

          It’s easy to get people to do what they want to do – if they can.

          That really simplifies the definition of the leadership role. You’ve narrowed it down to two objectives:

          First, get people to want to do whatever it is.

          Second, make it possible for them to do it.

          Simplifying the definition does not, of course, make the process easy. But it does make the way somewhat clearer.

          The fundamental challenge here is often expressed in the question: “How do I motivate people?”

          The quick answer is: “You don’t.”

That’s right. You can’t motivate people. You motivate yourself. I motivate myself. Each person moves himself/herself to act.

The leader, including the manager-as-leader, can make it attractive to do something, can clear the way to do that something, can assist those who are to do the something. You’re the catalyst, not the doer.

You manage the process and you sell it to the people. So many managers fail to articulate that role to themselves, don’t understand what it means. They work so hard, with so little to show for it. Well, don’t work like a dog, when you should be sly as a fox.

Back to the oversimplification, starting with the first objective. How do you arouse people’s desire to engage in the task at hand?

One way to do that actually  comes from how you solve the second: clearing away the obstacles to their participation.

Think back for a moment over your own experience in managing group efforts. When you had reluctance, resistance, avoidance on the part of your “team” members, what were their reasons for not getting on board?

          Too much to do already?

Well, help the person arrange a reduction in regular workload.

There’s no one else to do it? The manager is resisting?

Answer: Your manager has a problem. I’ll talk to your manager.

Oh, the manager won’t budge? OK, I’ll talk to the manager’s manager. I’ve already gotten full backing from the very top, so I will get you free to jump right in.

          If, indeed, the designated person cannot be properly cleared to participate in my project, then the organization will get me someone who can. Remember, I have the backing.

          Getting that backing – full, open delegation of real authority (or known access to authority) – is the absolutely essential first thing the project manager must obtain when he/she is appointed to carry out this organizational imperative. If you don’t have that power, hang it up. You’re done. Nothing is going to work.

          With that in place, your top priority is to arrange the environment for success across the entire range of project activity. Establishing a good process is a powerful incentive for good people to want to be part of this project.

          You seize the initiative. You don’t allow problems to invade your project, or grow in it. People of quality are energized when they see that kind of leadership.

          A second strength of the project manager is to build the individual and team spirit of success, the eagerness to engage and resolve difficult challenges in the company of true professionals. It is hard to overestimate how attractive it is for good people to be offered that opportunity.

          The project manager makes sure the right people are on the job, that they receive the right training, tools and processes to get the job done, that the right relationships are set up and nurtured, that the right things happen in meetings, in problem-solving and in celebration.

          Anyone who is not ignited with enthusiasm in such a circumstance doesn’t deserve to be part of it. And the wider organization will be bursting with eager candidates for the job.

Talk about motivation!

SEE ALSO:
How to Save Your Organization
http://jimmillikenproject.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-to-save-your-organization.html

Easy Doesn't

If it’s easy, don’t do it. It’s not good.

That statement may be the rare oversimplification that is true more often than not. It certainly is true of Project Management. Whatever you do the easy way won’t get the job done.

The emperor of this land of failure is “It’s easier to do it myself.” Of course it’s easier to do it yourself. Any fool knows that. Just do it. You don’t need to take the time to describe and explain it to someone who doesn’t know what you’re talking about, and may show clear signs of not really caring to find out.

It’s easier to do it yourself than to think through ways to keep track of someone else doing it, and easier than taking the time to figure out what they’re doing wrong, and get them to see that, then get them to see how to avoid doing it wrong again as soon as you turn your back.

It’s easier to do it yourself than it is to wait and wonder when it will get done, or whether it’s even under way yet, and whether there will be unexpected and unnecessary barriers in the way of whoever else is trying to do it.

There’s little or no pride in seeing a final result that is only 70 percent as good as it could have been, or one that doesn’t have the proud polish of true professionalism.

There’s a little extra embarrassment when some other expert makes amused remarks to you about the work done under your supervision that isn’t up to the standard you used to set back when you were more on your game.

On a really personal level, results that are solely and fully your own are deeply satisfying. You might not have much time to relax and admire such a result, but it beats the dickens out of settling for knowing that some group product was brought to an acceptable (unexciting) conclusion under your direction.

There often isn’t much praise at such moments, and what there is doesn’t qualify as the gee-whiz variety. And it’s spread around – by you, if you’re smart enough to know how to earn the loyalty of your worker bees. In fact, some contributor may be singled out for a bit of glory that you know really belongs to you – but you’re the manager, so you have to witness some lesser achiever getting the plaudits that used to be yours, and by rights ought to be right now

Truly, any fool knows it’s easier to do it yourself. It's easier than managing.

The real fool, of course, is the one who actually DOES it himself/herself as a matter of practice. And don’t kid yourself. Most of us do, too often. Hard to believe? Not really.

How to Save Your Organization

It’s the unlovely little secret of most organizations. It’s the universal challenge facing those responsible for the work of others. It’s the sand in the gears of group productivity.

What is it? Delegating, that’s what. Poor or nonexistent delegating.

Delegating is the reason we have managers. The managers’ job is to clarify and specify what is to be done, then subdivide the workload and assign suitable portions of it to the various people who are under the managers’ direction. Sometimes it works. When it does, it produces results whose quantity and quality rise well above the possible accumulation of individual outcomes from the same workforce.

When delegating doesn’t work, which is often, it is because the managers haven’t successfully set the goals, identified the work and transferred the responsibility. Alternatively, it doesn’t work because the delegatees haven’t done their part. They haven’t gotten it done correctly, or on time. And sometimes it doesn’t get done because it never really was assigned at all.

Same Old Wheel

History is the how-to manual for the future – but only if it lasts that long.

People are studying project success rates all the time, and they find that well over half of all projects fail to some significant degree, even when the standards of measurement are relatively forgiving.

Why are things this way? Well, there are the people, generally very good people. Then there’s the process, often not a very good process.

First, the people. Project managers, when they’re successful, are action people. They typically are not contemplative types. They thrive on engaging the multiple simultaneous challenges of complex innovation. Their days are consumed by the trials, errors and revisions that keep projects moving through the fog of uncertainty. If something works, great. If it doesn’t, let’s move right on and try something else.

This is the way to go, as far as it goes. When it doesn’t go far enough, the project manager’s workstyle, combined with other typical factors, does not encourage a cult of preparation and documentation. If they’re not careful, project managers are tempted to shortcut planning and tracking.

That can limit the formal planning/operating process to combining adoption of some old paperwork with finger-crossing for what’s new this time. There is no history. Individual memories tend to be selective and incomplete, and of course the memories leave when their owners do. The institution doesn’t develop and retain knowledge for use the next time.

When that happens, it results from a false choice: Either we get going and tackle this challenge, or we sit around and waste time attempting to plan the unplannable.

Don’t be tempted. Professional project management methodology, thoughtfully employed, works. It engages the unfamiliarity, the complexity and the risks – while actually taking less time and hassle.