Making you more effective at work to reach the next rung.
You can disagree with your boss and voice that disagreement. You can create value for your boss and and organization when you do it professionally. You can jeopardize your employment when you do it poorly. There is a time, place, and way to professionally disagree with your boss.
Responsibility, authority, and accountability are the the legs of effective delegation inside an organization. You have to have them in the proper relation to avoid failure. This true for delegation to you and from you to your directs. There are a lot of articles out there that attempt to define the words and claim victory. Others focus the relationships between them, but fail to define them adequately. We will take the approach of defining each term, briefly explaining each, and explaining their importance in the delegation of tasks.
In the course of your career, you will be called upon to run meetings. While different types of meetings, have some different rules, there are some things that remain constant. The first is start on time. The second is finish on time. Meetings can be expensive affairs. Starting and finishing on time are the first step to making sure they do not take up any more resources than necessary.
How can you increase the likelihood that when you assign tasks your directs will actually produce something useful? You assign a deliverable with a deadline to your direct. You give them a deliverable and a deadline. We are all familiar with deadlines. We encountered those in our schooling. But what is a deliverable? It is the specific, defined thing that must be turned in for the task to be complete.
How well are you using your time? Most people have a gut feeling about how well they make use of what time they have. You probably have an idea of your answer. How do you know that it is the right answer? The only way you can be sure is to do a time study. More precisely, I am talking about a Drucker Time Study.
Most managers know they should be delegating work. The majority do not delegate enough. One problem is that many of those same managers do not know what to delegate. What to delegate is only half of the problem. The other half, knowing how to delegate, is covered elsewhere, and we will go into it in more detail in the future. However, before we delegate work, we have to figure out which work we are going to delegate. As a manager your work falls into one of several categories, as far as delegation is concerned (i.e., vis-a-vi your direct reports):
Work that only you can do.
Work that your directs can do better than you.
Work that you can do better than your directs.
Few things are consistent from office to office as the complaining about email. “I get 200 emails a day; how do you expect me to get work done.” Some of you may be laughing at only 200, others are complaining about 40 emails. The problem here is rarely the volume of email. It instead is that post people don’t know what to do with their email.
There are sites out there that recommend only checking email three times a day (I agree). However, if you don’t know how to handle your email, it won’t matter how frequently or infrequently you check it. When you finish checking email and you still have two thousand or twenty emails in your inbox, you still haven’t handled your email.
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” This is known as Parkinson’s Law and was used to describe how bureaucracies justify their growth without an change in results to justify it (Economist, 19 Nov 1955). As Parkinson pointed out in his article, this equally applies to individuals. This is why when you have nothing on your calendar for the day, you find a way to spend all morning going through 25 minutes worth of email. However, what concerns us here is the implications this has for the manager. Parkinson’s Law applies to your subordinates as well as you.