Delegation is the art and science of how to assign work to other people in a way that eliminates your constant tending and gets you the results that you want.
I have a different take on delegation than most people. Usually, when business owners first start to delegate, they end up engaging in hallucinogenic doses of wishful thinking. No wonder it doesn't work well.
I'm putting delegation in its proper place: I believe that it needs to go hand in hand with project scoping in order to be effective. Have a watch.
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Karen Sergeant
The Transcript:
My definition of delegation is this how to assign work to other people in a way that eliminates your constant tending and gets you the results that you want. So delegation, the art and practice of it is considered the critical piece to eliminating yourself as a bottleneck. It's the actual contact point where the rubber is meeting the road. It's the handoff, but you can also see where this lesson falls in my overall framework.
It's nearly last. When a lot of people expect it to be one of the first things they need to learn. And that's because there's an emphasis out there that delegation is all about using the right words or the right vocabulary, that if you use the right words and the right way, it unlocks this magical world where others will do what you want. And I imagine you all like Gandalf standing before the gates of Moria with your arms outstretched and wolves at your back, wondering what is the right word that's going to make this thing work! Well, it's not like that. I'm putting delegation in its proper place. I believe that it needs to go hand in hand with project scoping in order to be effective. And I have a different take on delegation than most people, which brings me to my one thing, honor, thy team and the org chart honor.
The people that you've put in place to do the work. So back in the early 2000s, there was this quote by the Secretary of Defense, "You go to war with the army that you have not the army you wish to have." Now I know that Donald Rumsfeld is an unloved personality, but this quote is solid. I do find that, especially when CEOs learn that a best practice is to delegate higher order things to their team, that they end up engaging in hallucinogenic doses of wishful, thinking about who is actually on their payroll. So let me use an example of a business that none of us are in, but that we're all familiar with. And this will help me make my point. So in a restaurant kitchen, you have prep cooks that come in in the morning, they process the food and then come service time.
You have everyone working their own stations to handle and cook the food before it gets plated. And then it goes out of the kitchen. Those workers are entirely different people. Then the executive chef that would create a new menu item or the kitchen manager who would source your mushrooms and make sure the shifts are covered by the right number of people. And if you've never worked in a restaurant,
even if you've never worked in a restaurant, you know that the executive chef does not walk in and hand off a new menu item, a new dish to the grill guy and ask him to step up and take more, more ownership. You know, even if it's a hamburger, which the grill guy would end up being responsible for cooking, you don't hand off a menu item to the grill guy.
Not only does it sound absurd and a little unfair, you can see that it doesn't have much chance for success either. I do understand that a digital team is not a kitchen, but if I had a dollar for every, just take more ownership complaint, I could probably retire and buy a restaurant. So we know that merely assigning higher level goals or coaching people to take more ownership is probably not the right move.
Then what are the best practices? So here are mine.
Number one, assess your team. I'm going to give you a framework to do that so that you can create a team map. That's going to help you immensely. When you delegate number two, speak their language so that they can understand you and have a chance at being successful at what you're asking.
And three, fill holes if necessary. So once you have your team map, you may spot some key positions. And I called them the translator positions, some spots that may need filling, but many times simply having the team mapped out and having the Tradecraft is enough for you to see lots of improvement without any additional head count. So let's go through these one by one,
assessing your team. So we're going to map people out and place them on a continuum that I call the four CS. This is just my version of a delegation diagnostic. And I found it to be really helpful. So the continuum is clerks, custodians champions, and then Suisse C-suites. So there's a separate video where I walk through the, the assessment tool itself.
But what I want to say here is that when you get your map together, any one of these four, isn't better than another. And I don't just mean that in terms of cost or impact to the budget. If we go back to our kitchen metaphor and the grill guy in the kitchen, doing a busy dinner service, you need someone who can cook a burger to perfection every time,
50 times an evening, and love what he does. That is someone very well suited to that position. And he is not necessarily an aspiring chef. So those are the doers and the makers who take pride in what they're doing. And most businesses cannot run without them. Those people, we would call probably clerks. Now, I also want to be clear that these four are not an essential ladder.
Clerks are not under underperforming custodians who just need some coaching. You know, sometimes it can happen that way, but it's, it is not something to be assumed. So once we have your team mapped and assessed, then we can speak their language. There is going to be a separate video on this too, but here is a sneak preview. Clerks speak,
the language of tasks, custodians, speak the language of projects. They don't require everything spelled out for them. They're able to take a project or a small area of the business and keep the wheels, moving champions, speak the language of outcome goals. And they want the, to make decisions within parameters. And they understand that they're responsible for spotting and fixing problems that creep up in their area,
and then see sweaters speak the language of business goals. And, you know, here, I don't necessarily mean C-suite literally, I don't mean people that you have already designated to be CEOs or CFOs. These are simply maybe at the department head level or similar, maybe an outside expert there with you at the table, as you make key decisions. And they're debating with you whether something should happen or not,
or whether something is acute one priority or whether it needs to get pushed to a date later in the year, those are the C-suite errors. So clearly delegating to any one of these is different than delegating to any of the others. Not just formulated differently, although yes, but also what you are delegating. And before you say, you'd like to stack your deck with champions,
you probably don't. Although the appeal is obvious. Remember a person who craves latitude in their job and has shown that they can make responsible decisions is often not the person who is willing or able to cook a burger to perfection during rush hour with zero complaints from your diners. So they don't necessarily go together. There's a place in your business for all of these four.
So there is a separate video that goes into much more detail on how, but here I am covering the best practice that you must speak their language when you delegate and third fill holes, if necessary. So you may be wondering, especially if you have a fair number of them, can you run a business with a team of clerks? And the answer is yes,
and many businesses do and they thrive. The key is to make sure you have the translators in place that take your vision, the language you speak and translated into the language of the rest of your team speaks. So I'm talking mainly about a project manager. A project manager is more than a person who types things into a sauna or another program. It is one of the key translation duties they perform that's called a work breakdown,
and it simply means taking a larger chunk of work, which is a project and breaking it down into the individual tasks that need to get done. It also means identifying dependencies, what things need to be done before other things. And it also means working backwards from due dates and assigning appropriate deadlines so that everything is smooth. So think about it as I'm going to switch my metaphor from restaurants to home renovations,
but it's a difference between saying I'm going to redo the kitchen to have, to having someone itemize all the steps of the demolition, the ordering of items, the faucet, the sink, the backsplash tile, and scheduling the electrician to be prior to the drywall guys so that everything works in concert. So you want to be the person that says kitchen redo,
and then have everything fall into place while you concentrate on picking out some gorgeous countertop, you can do this. You just need a champion project manager in place to hand the Baton off to. So depending on what your team map looks like, there may be some holes to fill. And there may not. Once we get towards the end of the course,
I'll drop a video that talks about team optimization and potential hires, but I don't want you to get distracted right now. If you remember one of the first things I said in this program, when it began was the fix is not in your head count, it's in your habits. Well, that doesn't mean we wouldn't think about some strategic hires. I don't want you ever thinking that it's the magic solution to a bottleneck problem.
We're going to fight with the army that we have and use all the new trade craft that we're learning, and we're going to see big results. So there are two supplemental videos to this, the assessment tool that walks you through the four CS and how to map out your team and then delegation, RX, which is how to delegate to each of those four categories and then the homework.
So the homework is to do the team, map yourself, to get your team fully mapped, using the diagnostic, and then to attempt to use the delegation language, to take some of the projects that are currently on your plate and delegate them effectively. You can bring those to the weekly call and we can workshop them.
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