5 Myths That Block Effective Delegation in Business

Lets talk about the common myths of poor delegation and how you can overcome them. Your most valuable resources are the human resources entrusted to you to get the job done. They're far more valuable than computers or office space. Excellent managers are those who are capable of eliciting the highest quality performance from the people they manage. Now, your job as a manager is to get the maximum return on the company's investment in people. As much as 85% of the operating budget of any organization is invested in salaries and benefits. The question is, are you getting the maximum return out of those people? Delegation is one of the very best ways to do this. The average person works at about 50 to 60% of capacity. That means that half of their capacity is not being tapped in the average organization. An excellent organization is where people are using more and more of their potential ability to achieve the goals of the organization. Your job as a manager is to grow people. You are entrusted with the responsibility of taking care of your people and developing them. Because only people can be made to increase in value. A computer depreciates and becomes obsolete. People. People can actually grow in value depending on how they are managed and utilized. Use delegating to challenge your people and cause them to stretch and become more valuable. Delegation is the method. It is how you develop people. The way you delegate determines whether they grow and expand their capabilities or whether they contract. Most important of all is how it helps you to fulfill your personal potential. The wonderful thing is that your potential as a manager or executive is virtually unlimited, except by your ability to unleash the talents and abilities of others by delegating and supervising effectively. Now you have two choices. In the world of work. When something has been assigned to you and you are accountable to a higher authority, you can either do it yourself or get someone else to do it. Your ability to get somebody else to do it more than anything else is going to determine your career. Track your rate of promotion, your pay, your status, your position, your prestige, and your success as a manager. Often, managers do not delegate because of certain myths that they hold that may or may not be true. These are mental blocks of the individual manager. Some of these you are aware of, and some of them you are unconscious of. Wherever you see a poor delegator, you will probably see one of these myths at work. The number one myth is that there's not enough time. Sometimes people are so busy and swamped that they think they don't have enough time to sit down and explain the job to someone else. They just want to get on with it or they may delegate the job to another person, but they don't take enough time to walk them through it. They say, do this and have it done by such and such a time. They consider that to be delegation. In reality, this is not delegation, but abdication. Remember, there's always enough time. There's an old saying that there's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it over again. In poorly managed organizations or work units, there always seems to be enough time to do it over and correct the mistakes and misunderstandings from the first time. So eliminate that myth. Remember that taking the time to delegate well is the most effective investment of your time that you can engage in. Sometimes it will increase your productivity by five and 10 times. Now, we often have the tendency to think that the staff person is not competent enough to be delegated to. Very often, managers underestimate the ability of their people. But the only way that you can test how can capable people are is to give them more to do than they've done before and allow them the latitude to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes. People will surprise you. Amazingly enough, your staff probably have competences that you have never discovered. And if you learn to tap into their capabilities, not only will they get more fulfillment, but you'll get a lot more done which will help your career. Another myth is that if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. This idea, carried to its logical conclusion, guarantees failure in management. This myth will hold you back in management and condemns you to continually operating rather than managing. The biggest reason for failure in the executive suite and management is the inability to move from doing the job to managing the job. The natural tendency is to fall back into your comfort zone and start doing it rather than delegating it. Your job, remember, is to manage and not to operate. That's why you're a manager in the first place. The next myth is that people will think you're not on top of your job if you got somebody else doing it. The opposite is true. Often executives or managers are very greedy. They want people to think that they're on top of the job and know what's going on all the time. Today, you can never know what's going on everywhere, all the time. But you can always have access to the people who do know. The final myth is that because you are particularly good at something, you should do it yourself. The rule with regard to this is fairly simple. Whatever you have mastered and can now do, easily delegate it and get onto something else. You should not be working on tasks that are simple and routine for you. Again, the natural tendency is to fall into the habit of doing the jobs that we enjoy and keeping them for ourselves. Instead, delegate the easy things and get onto tasks that require greater complexity and greater involvement. Tasks that are more challenging. The starting point of delegation, like the starting point in all successful management, is hard. Thinking about the job. Think through exactly what has to be done. Most of the problems in management come from action without thinking. As a matter of fact, almost all failure comes from action. Before thinking, think through the job with clarity. There's an old saying that a stitch in time saves. 9. The time that you spend sitting down, itemizing the work and thinking through what happens has to be done and when and to what level of quality is the starting point of effective delegation. Often, people delegate first or hand out tasks first and then think through the job afterwards. The second consideration is your approach. How are you approaching it? And could there be a better way? When I go into a company as a management consultant, I find that the most important contribution that I can make is is to help people ask the right questions. I help them to engage in a questioning process so that they can challenge their most cherished assumptions. We start off with thinking through where they are going, where they're starting from, how they are doing it now, and could there be a better way? To be your own management consultant, you have to do the same thing. How are you approaching each task? A good point that comes to mind continually is should it be done internally in the first place? Maybe it would be cheaper as a starting point to have it done by someone else and having someone else in your office, simply coordinate it. We call this outsourcing. Make a list of everything that has to be done in the completion of a task or the achievement of an objective. What are all the different tasks that have to be done to create a job? Remember that every minute spent in planning saves 10 to 12 minutes in execution. The biggest single payoff you'll ever get as a manager comes from planning. And all planning begins with a paper and pen and making lists of what has to be done and how. Lastly, be sure that you match the activities to the people and the skills that they possess. This is a mental tool that you can use to be more effective in your delegating efforts. Each person and each work unit may made up of individuals can be viewed as a factory. A factory has certain inputs. Raw materials, resources, time, money, equipment. Inside the factory, certain activities are performed. The result of these activities is specific outputs or what you might call results. The productivity of the factory is judged solely on the basis of the quality and quantity of its results, not on its activities. So when you think of your unit or department or company or your area of responsibility, think of it in terms of a factory. Then ask yourself, what results are we supposed to produce? Why do we exist? What have you been hired to accomplish? Then when you look at each person in your organization, think of them also as a factory. They have resources available to them. They have activities that they do, and they have outputs that they accomplish. They are on the payroll to get results. A critical part of delegation is to think through the results that you're trying to accomplish and keep people's attention focused on these results. One of the hallmarks of all successful managers and all effective people is an intense result orientation. One of the hallmarks of ineffective people is that they focus on activities rather than on accomplishments. You can increase your overall outputs by utilizing your time and resources more effectively. This is called managerial leverage. This is a very important concept which comes from Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel Corporation. He says there are certain things that you can do that can multiply your output or that of your area of responsibility. The manager's job is to do the things that give him or her the maximum leverage. For instance, buying a computer or buying a copier rather than sending your work out. These are decisions that can give you tremendous leverage. And delegation is a way to get leverage as well. Delegation enables you to multiply your outputs. When you instruct or teach or show a person what to do, they can then do the job for you, which will double or triple your total output. However, managerial leverage works in reverse as well. Imagine that an average employee working at an average Speed can produce 10 units of work per day. As a manager, you can either multiply or divide that amount. Suppose that this person is working at half speed. With effective delegation, you can multiply that 10 by maybe a factor of 1.5. You may get those units up to 15 per day. However, with ineffective or fuzzy or vague delegation, you may drop that number to eight or even five. Because of confusion, they will waste time and spin their wheels. A key question you have to ask yourself is, are you a multiplication sign in your work environment, or are you a division sign? Do people produce more as a result of working with you and with others around you? Or do they produce less as a result of the ineffectiveness of your delegation? Whatever it is, your ability to delegate effectively and well largely determines your success as a manager.