Chapter 3 – Delegate and Elevate, page 21.
- If you’re like many bosses, you’re frustrated by a lack of time to do your job well.
- Completing the Delegate and Elevate exercise helps you discover whether you truly want to do boss-related activities focused on leading and managing people.
- This exercise will help you identify those activities that energize you and those you should delegate to others.
- This tool will help put your true gifts in perspective so you can focus your energy and time on your strengths.
- The Delegate and Elevate exercise is a five-step process that should not be hurried.
The Delegate and Elevate Exercise
Step 1 – List all business-related activities
- List all of the business-related activities you do during the course of a day, a week, and a month.
- This may take several hours or even a week (or longer). Don’t rush. Be patient and detailed.
Step 2 – List all boss-related activities
- After completing your list of business-related activities, review the list of boss-related activities below. Add any boss-related activities you may have overlooked to your list.
Step 3 – Place each activity in one of four quadrants
- When you are satisfied your list is complete, place each activity into one of the four quadrants below.
Step 4 – Assess the location of boss-related activities
- In the four quadrants, examine where you placed the activities that were boss-related and specific to dealing with direct reports.
- A minimum of 80 percent of those activities from the boss-related list in the third column should be in the top two quadrants.
Step 5 – Build a plan to delegate business-related activities
- If you cannot complete all of the boss-related activities you listed in the time you have, then you have a time capacity issue.
- You need to “delegate and elevate” the activities in the bottom two quadrants that are occupying too much of your time.
Analyzing Your Four Quadrants
- If you are a person who loves and is great at boss-related activities but hasn’t mastered business-related activities, you may be a great people person, but those skills alone are not enough to make you a great boss.
- Conversely, if you are someone who loves and is great at business-related activities, but dreads boss-related activities, you may be a technically competent manager of things – just not people. Technical skills alone won’t make you a great boss.
Words of Encouragement
- Great bosses aren’t born; they develop.
- You may have placed many of the boss-related activities in the bottom two quadrants because you failed at doing them well in the past.
- The reason(s) why you failed may be unrelated to your capacity to be a great boss.
- Like you, many bosses find themselves consumed with the business-related activities they do every day.
- If you are willing to develop the skills to become a great boss and delegate the rest, there’s hope.
- If not, don’t kid yourself. You’ll struggle to fulfill the role of a great boss and you’ll continue to frustrate yourself and those you’re trying to lead.
Delegation
- You don’t always have the luxury of delegating everything in the bottom two quadrants.
- However, to leverage your emotional, intellectual, physical, and time capacity to do your job, you must develop a plan to delegate items in the bottom two quadrants.
- Ideally, you should delegate as many activities as it takes to get down to 90% of your weekly total capacity.
- This will free up extra capacity to prepare you to grow, recharge, and, worst case, handle the emergencies that inevitably come up every week.
Elevation
- By delegating the activities in the bottom two quadrants, you’re actually doing yourself and your team a big favor.
- You are elevating yourself to do what you love and what you do well.
- You make yourself more valuable to the organization, not to mention being happier and more energetic.
- You will free up more of your time to spend with your team, making them feel more valued.
- You are giving them more responsibility, autonomy, and authority.
- Best of all, your people may be more competent at the activities in the bottom two quadrants than you are.
Most common reasons bosses give for not delegating (“personal head trash”):
- Being good at these activities got me promoted in the first place.
- I have no one to delegate to.
- It takes me too much time for me to train someone.
- I find that it’s faster and easier to do it myself.
- I wouldn’t ask anyone to do something I wouldn’t do myself.
- No one can do it as well as me.
- It’s too complicated to explain it to them.
- I spend too much time fixing their mistakes.
Conclusion
- You must get past the excuses not to delegate or you are destined to stagnate or find yourself replaced by a great boss.
- Employees need to know you trust them.
- You must be willing to delegate those activities you’ve become good at doing but are not the best use of your time.
- You must delegate to create the time capacity to grow yourself.
- Leading and managing people is your number one role as a boss.
- The more direct reports you have and the more diverse their roles, the more time a boss must devote to leading and managing.
