How to Manage by Delegating (So You Can Achieve Your Goals)!

We can’t achieve most of our goals in life unless we master delegation. We can’t get promoted or be incredibly successful in business without mastering delegation.. We can’t enjoy our next vacation either unless we learn how to delegate so that your family can enjoy you and not half of you on vacation. Without mastering the skill of delegating, we burnout, our health suffers and we can’t reach our full potential in life.

This course will not only help us to decide WHY to delegate, but more importantly, we will learn exactly WHAT to delegate and HOW to delegate so that we can spend more time focusing on our goals while developing, nurturing and helping our employees grow and reach their full potential as well. As our employees grow, so do we as I humbly believe that when one teaches, two learn. 

If you find that there is never enough time in each day to get closer to accomplishing your goals and if you feel that you don’t lead a very fulfilling and balanced life, then you aren’t delegating enough or you aren’t focusing on the right things in your life at the right time.

We will fix this in the exercise in this section, which is Step 1 of 3. 

Before deciding what we should delegate, we need to understand what our priorities are; what goals should we be focusing on? Most people conclude that you just delegate  anything that is cheaper for someone else to do than u or that you don't have the expertise in. It’s more than that tough as we need to try to delegate tasks that are also repetitive or routine and ones that don’t help us get closer to achieving our professional goals.

Please repeat the exercise that I am going to teach you in this current lesson every day right after dinner for the next 10 week days. All I ask is 5 minutes of your time every day right after dinner for 10 consecutive week days to complete this daily exercise and I promise you that you will notice dramatic improvements in your quality of life and productivity through delegation strategies. 

Please find attached your 1st of 3 exercises in PowerPoint and PDF format. Please watch this and the next lecture lecture before completing the attached exercise. 

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Please see the attached sample completed form, which we will discuss in this lecture. 

So by now you have completed the first exercise and scored yourself. Scoring yourself is very subjective and I am not concerned about your score as all I want to see is an improvement in your daily score over the next 10 days of completing the form and hopefully you will customize this form and complete your own personalized version every week day beyond the 10 days so you can focus on achieving your goals and delegating tasks that are within reason of course not the best use of your time as work towards achieving your goals.

By only looking at the rate of change meaning improvement in the score and not the score itself, we will become more efficient at prioritizing what is important to our success, which of course includes delegating more. 

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Here are 4 business and career oriented items that I humbly believe should not be delegated (we will discuss these 4 in more detail in this lecture:

1: Important customers or potential important customer facing tasks 

2: High level strategic planning and tasks that you will be doing when you get promoted to the next level

3: Private or sensitive company items

4: Human resources issues like employee reviews, hiring or unfortunately letting people go

Please find attached a free version of my book and a free version of my Udemy course on productivity improvements called 30 Day Challenge to a More Productive and Much Happier You. Thank you

The Harvard Business Review published an article highlighting the 6 T's of What to Delegate, which is included in this non-video lecture (article only). 

“Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere as long as the policy you've decided upon is being carried out.” - Ronald Reagan

When delegating to employees, we need to sell it them the right way so that they want to do what you are going to delegate to them. If we delegate the right way, then this boosts morale otherwise, one disgruntled employee can easily destroy the culture and productivity of your entire team. There is a saying that one bad apple destroys the whole bunch. 

The worst thing we can possibly do is to micromanage someone because it hurts their confidence and their trust in you. Micromanaging is demeaning as it implies that our employees are not competent enough to the do the job, which is not the case.  So when we delegate, we need to ask their opinions on how to do the job more efficiently. Remember the first time your boss or somebody more senior than you asked for your opinion. It felt good right! So please ask your employees for their opinions when delegating on how “WE” can complete the delegated task more productively than we have in the past so we can work smarter and not harder. And once your employees figure out a better way to do delegated tasks, then we should not only complement them, but also share their new brilliant best practices not only with the rest of your team, but also with your boss.

This is a win win win situation….a win for your employee as they have an awesome sense of appreciation and purpose, a win for you because you are helping someone grow and freeing up time for you by delegating so that you can focus on your goals and a win for management as they love when other managers develop employees. Win win win.

 We will go through the formal process of how to delegate in the next lecture when we do an exercise…but you always want to not only ask for your employee’s opinions, but you want to also ask at least once during the delegation process, “please let me know if you have any questions.”

People want to be appreciated. We all want approval and almost all of us never receive or give enough approval in our lives. Delegating and approval should go hand in hand. Social media is all about approvals. Delegation should also be about managerial approval. 

Delegating is mentoring. Delegation is empowering. Delegating can enhance the culture and productivity of a team. 

Why is it that small groups of people in garages change the world and not large stogy companies? One of the many reasons is that smaller teams and smaller companies give more autonomy through delegated tasks and the culture and morale at these smaller companies or in smaller teams is very positive because of the delegating of high impact tasks. 

These people feel important and they feel like they can put a dent in the universe and change the world.  We need to run our teams like we are in a garage or in a start-up too and delegate important tasks to others. If your employees hear you say I believe you and I believe in you, then they will want to make that approval a reality. It’s not only about money. 

Delegating is about approval. Delegating the right way to an underperforming employee can make this employee the top performing person on the team in an instant. Focus on the WHY and not just the what of the task. When you have confidence in another person, they will increase the confidence they have in themselves and watch out because this person that you built this MASSIVE amount of confidence in will be loyal forever and tasks you delegate to them will be done right from the heart and much better than by other employees. Delegating is confidence and mentoring. Win win. 

Please find attached your second of 3 exercises in PowerPoint and PDF format. Please watch this lecture before completing the attached exercise. 

Please complete just the white portions of this form, including when the delegated task is due. Make sure to make the due date earlier than the real due date in order to plan for contingency or potential issues that might arrive. Then when you are done completing the white section, have the employee that you are assigning the task to complete the grey shaded boxes and meet with them to discuss the completed form.

When you enter the skills required part of the form, this will help you think about who is the best fit on your team or not on your team to do this task. Or you can give the 3 skills required to human resources if you work in a big company and ask them for help finding a resource or look to hire someone with the 3 skills that you write down as a full time or part time or outsourced employee or use online resources like fiverr.com etc to find someone that can do the task. As a quick side note, I outsource all of my book covers and graphic art projects to people at fiverr.com as it doesn’t make sense for me to have someone in house do that work. 

You can also think about all of the employees that work for you and write down 3 things each one excels at relative to the others if this helps you decide who to delegate this task to.

Next up. After you have completed what, why and the skills required, then consider providing some instructions in the HOW section….and optional comments on budgets and miscellaneous information. Please don’t provide too many details though if you are delegating this task to someone that already works for you as we want them to do the task and be happy doing it. If you outsource the task then yes you can be much more detail oriented in the instructions.

The last thing to complete on this one pager before giving it to the person you want to delegate the task to is to write down at the bottom here the date, time and location of a checkpoint update meeting to see if they are on track and if the quality of the work done so far is great etc.

One of the last things you should ask in the delegation meeting is “please let me know if you have any questions for me and please complete the grey box on the left side of this page before starting. And please let me know if you have enough time and resources to complete this task. It’s ok if you don’t. Just please let me know.”

If there is a gap in their skill set that blocks them from being able to complete the task and if you have the budget for it, consider sending them to receive training in person or through an online course. Employees love it when you invest in them and build their skills. If they do this training, have them email a brief write-up to the team on what they learned from the training etc.

Tell them that you are giving them autonomy to do it their way and try to optimize the process. Then tell them that prior to your checkpoint meeting or update call, to please update the other two grey boxes on the form and send the completed form back to you. You can even have them complete the form another time after the task is completed so you can analyze the grey box on the right side which deals with how they optimized the task. We will talk about the post mortem or post delegation review and best practices process in more detail in the next section of the course, which is part 3.

 Before completing the attached form, please watch the next lecture on additional optional criteria to consider prior to completing the form. 

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Here is an optional step: if you work in a company that has a formal documented human resources criteria on what your employees need in order to get promoted, then read that document and include the criteria in the WHY section of this 1 page template as it will motivate employees to do a great job at this delegated task and for them to take complete ownership of the task and do it on-time and under budget if applicable.

Another optional step is if you want think about how you can get your employee to enjoy the task, which helps your team’s culture. Perhaps they can work from home on this, listen to music, get free food and free beverages etc. Your employees love you even more when you let them reduce their commute time to work and spend more time with family…meaning working from home – if this is an option.

The last optional step is While you fill out this template in this exercise also think about how your current and previous bosses delegated to you….meaning which of their techniques worked and which ones did not? Please keep in mind that you learn a lot sometimes in terms of what not to do when managing people when you work for others that are awful at managing….there is a silver lining to having a bad manager. We learn how not to manage!

Please complete the attached form* now and then if you want, please watch the next lecture on a sample of how I completed the form. 

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* Please note that these attachments are the same ones that are attached to the previous lecture. I attached them twice in case students decide to incorporate the additional optional steps from this lecture. 

Please see the attached sample completed form for Step 2 on How to Delegate, which we will discuss in this lecture. 

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In addition to the checkpoint meeting, if the employee is quite new or if you aren’t comfortable with their quality of work yet, then you can set up another checkpoint meeting or have them send you a very simple daily progress update email that contains these 3 topics:

1: Tasks accomplished today

2: Tasks to accomplish tomorrow

3: Questions, Issues or Concerns. 

Once the employee has more experience and once you feel comfortable with their progress, then please reduce the frequency of these email or in person checkpoints so that you are not micromanaging the process. And of course provide positive feedback on the amount that they have improved and not just on the quality of their work. We need to reward improvement.  

“Are we limiting our success by not mastering the art of delegation?” Oprah 

Your boss likely loves structured business processes as it gives them even more confidence in you that your team has built portable business best practices that you can scale and implement potentially at a firm wide level as you progress throughout the organization! 

In the exercise in this current step, which is step 3, I created a document that we will complete in exercise #3 that is a more formal post mortem or post delegation completion review form, which I called step 3 of 3: best practices /key learnings/post mortem. This can be used in your review meetings (with your boss and with employees).

“I find that many entrepreneurs are trying to do everything when it would be cheaper and more time-efficient to delegate.“ -James Altucher

Please find attached your third of 3 exercises in PowerPoint and PDF format. Please watch this lecture before completing the attached exercise. 

This final exercise 3 is easier than the previous two. The audience of this form we are going to complete is not just your boss, but also your peers if they want to implement similar business processes that you have and you can also share this with your team as you give credit to the awesome empowered and passionate employee of yours that completed the delegated task. 

If your employee messed up part of the delegated process, then you can meet with this employee alone and review this one page document here in step 3 and discuss what WE can learn from this.

The beauty of completing this exericse here in step 3 is that we can reuse this simple one pager and do the delegated tasks later much cheaper, faster and with a higher degree of quality. 

 The form is simplistic enough that I don’t really need to explain how to complete it. It is intended to be completed only by you the boss. You can even give a copy to HR to put in the employee’s file. HR will love this process too.

 My favorite part of this form is the discussion you can have with your employee praising them and discussing together and asking their opinion on what did we learn about how to be more productive when completing this process going forward so that other or all employees in the firm can learn from your awesome work, your incredible initiative and the brilliant new, better, cheaper faster way of completing this task.

If you have any questions on completing or customizing this form, please let me know. Thank you and congratulations as we are now done with step 3 of 3 in the course and we are done with the exercises as well. You know have tools to help you know what to delegate, how to delegate and how to provide delegation related feedback that will not only help to nurture and grow your employees skills sets, but your own as well. Thank you very much for your time and for your commitment. Thank you.

“The first rule of management is delegation. Don’t try and do everything yourself because you can’t.“ - Anthea Turner

Thanks a lot and I hope you enjoyed the course!
Chris

In this course we have talked about providing feedback and nurturing employees through delegation….but I think that we all need to be nurtured on how to delegate as well if we want to also progress and achieve our goal of getting promoted. As such, I want to quickly talk about a side note of the importance of being mentored and asking those that are successful in your company which has its own distinct and unique culture on additional best practices or best ways  to delegate more effectively. 

If we want to get promoted we need to have many mentors and I love to refer to these as Yodas. So who is the perfect mentor? We will discuss this in this lecture. 

“As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” 
– Bill Gates