Making you more effective at work to reach the next rung.
There are three types of power in organizational life: role power, expertise power, and relationship power. Role power is the power you have because of your position. The second, expertise power, is the power others give you because of your ability and knowledge. Finally, relationship power is the power you have because of the strength of your relationships with others.
It is not unusual for a manager to not care why one of their direct reports does the work, only that the work gets done. There is an element of truth in this. However, you, as a manager, also care how well the work gets down. Team members that are committed to the objective produce better work than those that are merely complying with directives from above.
“Team” has become a pervasive concept when talking about a manager and his directs. It is a useful metaphor, but it is incomplete by itself. Teams function differently in different sports. The late, great management thinker Peter F. Drucker calls out three types of teams in his opus Management. They are the baseball team, the football team, and the tennis doubles team.
The feedback you give should always be about the behavior of your direct. If you cannot link your feedback to a behavior, don’t give it. We tell you how.
As managers, we know it is our job to correct behaviors that our subordinates engage in that is ineffective. The sad truth is, we generally don’t do it until it has gotten pretty bad. We wait and wait to give feedback before we feel compelled to step in. Then when we finally give feedback, we wonder why it is so painful and our direct is less receptive. Imagine if your bank informed you about your account balance this way. After several months of no statements they told you that you were $10,000 overdrawn. You would not be happy with your bank. You might be annoyed when your bank tells you your account is overdrawn by $2, but you are at least you can prevent future problems. The same principle holds true with your directs and their performance.
Whenever I find a plan or a team that is going nowhere or going in circles one of two things tend to be the cause. 1) Everyone agrees on what needs to be done but disagree on the amount of resources to dedicate (or all refuse to dedicate any resources, they are just admiring the problem); or 2) there is no common understanding of what the group is trying to accomplish. If the second is the problem, no matter how much energy the organization puts into the effort, little to nothing useful will get accomplished. The group often benefits when one brave person decides to speak up and ask, “So, what are we trying to accomplish here?”
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.
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.
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.
“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.