Managers and leaders at all levels are responsible for delegating so they maintain enough capacity to step up and take on projects for their boss. Here’s how to make it a habit in your company.
Originally posted on Forbes online: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertsher/2018/06/04/too-busy-to-be-promoted-save-your-career/
CEOs of midsized companies are sick and tired of leaders who are too busy. Too busy to step up on special projects. Too busy to step up and participate in strategy. Too busy to think long term. Those CEOs need to find ways to delegate critical work, and we advise them how. But if you’re not the CEO, you won’t like what we say.
Consider one insurance industry CEO who has recently sold 90% of his company to a private equity firm. His board wants him to start acquiring other businesses, but to do that he’ll have to take 20-30 hours of work per week off his calendar to free up the time. His leadership team, with whom he grew the business, is already working at capacity. This CEO has a big problem. Read this article about the role of HR in building incredible teams.
Managers and leaders at all levels are responsible for maintaining enough capacity to step up and take on projects for their boss. This proves they can work at the next level. If they don’t, they are signaling that they are too busy to be promoted, and the boss should hire someone above them (and yes, that’s effectively a demotion). More brutal still, some CEOs can’t afford to add a leader—they must dismiss their lowest performing leader and replace them with someone much better. I told you that you wouldn’t like it. But there is a gentler, kinder approach.
Delegate every quarter. Every manager and leader should delegate some of their workload on a regular basis. By delegating, capacity is created to take work off the boss’s plate. Everybody is learning and growing, and so too the business will grow. In contrast, when everyone is swamped, only the urgent items get tackled—the strategic and important (often including revenue generating activities)—get far less attention than they should.
Delegating is not easy
Delegating seems like an obvious solution, but if it’s so obvious, why don’t more leaders do it consistently? Because done poorly or in isolation, it can fail. Some plop work on somebody’s desk who doesn’t have time to do it and is never trained. Fail. Others delegate work to someone who has no ambition to move up in the organization. Fail. Worse, others delegate work to someone who is incompetent to do that work. Fail. We’ve all made these mistakes. Then we take back the work and say, “See, I’m the only one here who can do it.”
Like many things in midsized organizations, delegation must be planned and driven by a process. And the success of such efforts must be informed by data which tells us if all is going well (or not). From the supervisor level on up to the CEO, there must be an integrated plan that drives ongoing delegation at all levels. Just as quality firms have carefully thought out and executed performance reviews, they must also program in delegation. Here’s how to make it a habit in your company.
First, every leader at every level should commit to delegating between 10% and 20% of their work to a subordinate every year (this depends on the growth rate of the company). Each task should be listed at the beginning of the year, along with the name of the person who will learn the task, the start date and end date for training, and the hours of work per week that will shift. Spread the delegation time frames out over the course of the year. All this must be in writing.
Recognize that tasks move between positions, just as people do. For example, a few of the simpler director-level tasks are delegated to a manager. But when that manager gets promoted to his boss’s role, he takes those director-level tasks with him. Over the course of the next few years, he may delegate them again to new manager below him.
Lay the year’s plans to delegate at once with an executive sponsor overseeing the cascade of delegations, and the timing. For example, all 15 managers across the company identify specific tasks to delegate to named subordinates, with the timing specified. We suggest targeting delegating 10% of their workload. Once those plans are set, perhaps the next day, the 7 directors at the company repeat the process, laying plans to delegate 10% of their work to the managers (who now have a clear path to making the time to handle more work). Immediately following, the 4 VPs do the same thing, shifting work onto the director’s plates. When it’s complete, each calendar quarter should have a schedule of delegations in writing.
In the real world, there will always be work that should be delegated and no one qualified to delegate it to. The career limiting answer is to retain the work at the higher level. Instead, the leader must change the people who report to him or her. That could mean dismissing someone and hiring a more qualified replacement. Or it might mean bringing in new talent at a higher level. Or it might mean, especially in quickly growing businesses, that the workload of one leader gets split between that leader and a new peer to be hired.
The reporting and review of data plays a huge role here. A May 2018 study of midsized companies by Oxford Economics reports that 69% indicated that investments in technology would support retraining of existing management resources. They have live data, regular meetings or dashboards that verify that the work is being done, and being done well. Sometimes data comes from technology systems and at other times it comes from periodic review (and capture) of performance levels. Good leaders don’t delegate and forget.
Training and coaching is a critical part of delegating. The delegator should write up a simple plan that sets aside enough time to train, mentor and review the transfer of work. There should be an endpoint on the calendar when success or failure is declared. Failure is hard, but declaring failure is crucial toward redirecting that person to work they are more capable of delivering and finding a new person to handle the work. Read this post on the power of mentoring.
Leaders of small firms simply do the work that lands on their desk. But a crucial role of the leaders of growing midsized companies is to regularly design the allocation of work among a team of leaders such that everyone is growing in their career as the company grows. A majority of leaders are slowly moving into their boss’s role. They are not too busy to be promoted. It is the companies that do this successfully who have ample leadership bandwidth to keep outgrowing their competitors.
