A Game-changer....The Gentle Art of Delegation

A Game-changer....The Gentle Art of Delegation

A great and highly recommended book that I point my clients in the direction of is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Having read it clients tend to take a good look at their own leadership skills in the metaphorical mirror, some also feel the need to upgrade their delegation skills. It’s interesting to note that those that take the effort to improve their delegation skills also report that their businesses are just that little bit easier to run.

Are you good at delegating?

A great many business owners, executives and managers struggle with delegation. The most common excuse I get for not delegating is people feel it takes more time to delegate and quality of work isn’t as good so they might as well do it themselves. Yet delegation when carried out correctly is an extremely valuable tool and has two major benefits for you the business owner, executive or manager:

·         It will free up your time so that you can focus on the tasks that add the most value to your business and not those that are well below your pay grade.

·        By empowering others and helping them to grow you are developing future leaders.

A useful distinction here is to note the difference between delegation and abdication. Abdication is giving someone a task without any direction and hoping they get it right. Delegation on the other hand is giving someone a task whilst you still retain responsibility for the outcome of the task.

Delegation is not a waste of time it is an investment in time.

Make a list of the tasks that you are carrying out on a day to day basis. Now mark each task on a scale of 1-10 how much do you enjoy doing this task (10 = Love it) then mark again on a scale of 1-10 how much skill does it take to do the task (10 = high level of skill)

Now pick one task that has scored low on both the skill and enjoyment scale and ask yourself “Why am I holding onto this task” at some level you have a resistance to handing it over.

Make a list of your reasons for not delegating the task.

Now make a list of the reasons that you should delegate the task. What would be different in your world if someone else could effectively do the task?  If this view of the future excites you it will be worth your while moving forward with the delegation process and follow these four steps:

1.   You watch me doing

First you need to identify someone with the correct knowledge, skillset, attitudes and ability to learn and is willing to take on the task. Failure to identify the right person will inevitably lead to the cry of “I might as well do it myself”.  Once you have identified the right person have them watch you carry out the task. This will take no extra time because you are doing the task anyway. A really useful exercise is to get this person to document the steps as you go through them this will then form the basis for the future systemisation of your business.

2.   Now you help me do it

Now repeat the task whilst the other person helps you whilst at the same time reviewing, updating and adding to their original notes. This step may take a little longer but is so worthwhile and it is always good to remind yourself of the benefits of delegating the task that you identified above.

3.   I help you whilst you carry out the task

It’s time to take a step back and observe your delegatee carrying out the task whilst following their own notes. At times, you may have to step in and assist them. Look for the bottlenecks in their process and learning, ask questions to help them deepen the learning whilst also identifying any future training needs.

4.   You complete the task whilst I observe

Now have the person carry out the task using their notes whilst you observe. You may have to overcome the urge to step in and help them just to speed things up. The key to this step is to get them to think for themselves, so if they ask you a question use the ‘hedgehog’ technique and fire a question back at them with the aim of getting   them think. For instance, “Looking at your notes – what do you think you should do?”

When I suggest delegating tasks to the people I work with the main kick back I get is ‘the process takes too much time’. The challenge with this approach is, you will have to use your time to do the task anyway, and these tasks are holding you back from focusing on your true value to business. So ask yourself “What is the true cost to the business if I hold onto this task and how long am I prepared to put up with that?”

Learning the art of delegation has to be one of the biggest opportunities open to you to find the time you need to actively work ON your business.

I would be interested in your comments and to learn if you have a different/better system for delegation that is working for you?

Are your daily habits getting in the way of your success?

It’s true to say that each and every one of us have our own leadership style. Your style will be driven by such things as your vision, beliefs, values, experiences and attitude.

I remember a quote by Oscar Wilde “Be yourself everyone else is taken” and I absolutely agree with what he is saying, where I sometimes have a challenge with this is occasionally being yourself can really get in the way of your success.

When we set out on the journey of business ownership, our leadership style is something that tends to evolve on a day to day basis. You might see examples of great leadership whilst watching your favourite sport, watching a film, reading a book and think to yourself ‘I need to work on adapting that trait’ and you set about practicing that trait. The reason you would practice is because you have learnt that practice makes perfect which is in fact wrong, practice makes permanent! This is just one of the ways we develop bad habits.

In business, very few people have ever been trained to run a business and so they learn ‘on the job’ and sometimes this leads to practicing some tasks in an imperfect way which leads to bad habits that soon become a way of life normally shrouded in the words “that’s how we do things around here.”

Here are just 3 bad habits that you may have developed whilst growing your business. If you find yourself guilty of any of them consider ways in which you could stop or manage so they stop having a negative effect on your business future.

Not having a system for assigning priorities.
As a conscientious business owner when a situation arises that needs your attention you must always get to the bottom of it as soon as it arises right? Wrong. Going about business in this way will severely restrict the growth of your business or you will one day tear yourself apart. You will be the bottleneck within your business for two reasons

1. Whilst you might be paying your people to work for you by jumping in and getting involved in fixing everything you are in fact training your team to always leave it up to you to fix things. In actual fact you are paying people to be your audience!
2. Not everything demands your attention straight away; you need to learn how to prioritise matters according to their level of urgency and importance.

If you respond to every concern because of time constraints placed upon you, you will be putting important tasks which do need your attention on the back burner, “I’ll get round to fixing that someday” challenge is because of you lack of prioritisation you will always be reactive to the urgent pressing matters which innovatively means the important stuff will get pushed back again. It becomes a vicious circle.

Allowing yourself to get distracted.
You settle down to get on with an important task and the phone rings, your email pings, there is knock at the door the list goes on. There will always be other things vying for your attention. It is up to you to change the environment around you so that you can immerse yourself in your important tasks. This can be as simple as setting blocks of time during the day to check your emails and then being disciplined to only deal with email during these times.

If the door is constantly getting knocked keep a log of who the culprits are and what are the disturbances about. It may be you need to put some more systems in place to stop the disturbances or it could be something as simple as a polite sign on the door!

If you find yourself being drawn to what is happening outside the window turn your desk around.

The key here Is to keep a log of what is distracting you and committing to putting in place strategies to stop these disturbances from taking you off track.

Being a perfectionist
It could be argued that being a perfectionist isn’t a habit yet just like any other behaviour it is manageable. If you set absurdly high standards for yourself and your team you could well be sabotaging any chance you have of success.

Striving for perfectionism will more than likely lead to a great deal of procrastination and you can’t steer a parked car, so progress for your business becomes stalled.

The pressure to be perfect can also freeze up creativity and take all the fun out of doing a task which leads to tasks taking longer because there is little pleasure in doing them.

Make room for imperfections, a lot of successful businesses came from failures. Never be afraid to stumble and fall, because you will learn more from failure than anywhere else.
 

If you find yourself confused, procrastinating and would like to discover how you can take control of your time, become more productive and have more time for the important thing in your life, join us on Friday 21st July and we will provide you with the tools, templates and knowledge you need to gain at the very minimum one extra hour per day!   

What’s more we will guarantee it! If you don’t believe that the tools and information you receive will gain you at least 5 hours back in your working week we will give you a 100% refund, no questions asked.

To book your place/s simply click here

 email susan@mpcforprofit.com

or call the office on 0151 348 1202 and one of the team will be happy to help you

 Are your a business owner serious about improving the results you're currently getting from you business ? Then this FREE workshop is definitely for you...

Henry Ford once said "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got." So if you are a business owner who's frustrated with your current business performance and would like more sales, profits, cash flow, and more success, then you will need to do something different. That difference is what this workshop is all about!

WHO SHOULD ATTEND…

The workshop has been developed for business owners with established businesses that employ a team of people and are open to new ideas and tactics for building their business. If you are looking for ideas to help you focus, or just motivation and strategies to move your business forward, you will find this information in-valuable.

WHAT DO WE COVER?

In a content packed 4 hours, just some of what you will learn:

 The one big barrier stopping you from growing your business.

 The 4 Stages to Sustainable Business Growth. Miss any of these and your profits will be leaking away.

 Creating marketing that works.

 The 5 elements to growing your profits.

 The Art of Systems and why they are the key to you working less hours.

 The 7 Keys to Building to Building a Winning Team.

 How you can achieve double digit growth year in year out.

We guarantee you will leave this workshop with at least 5 ideas any one of which can transform your business…

WHO ARE MPC?

MPC are a team of dedicated business coaches working with mainly local business owners who really want to grow their businesses and see the value of investing in themselves to achieve their goals more quickly and easier than they could do on their own. In 2016 more than 80% of our clients enjoyed double digit growth.

SO HOW MUCH IS THIS GOING TO COST ME?

This is a FREE workshop. Why is it FREE because statistics show that business failures are on the increase and we really want to help reverse that trend so this is an open workshop for businesses of all shapes and sizes with a whole host of different challenges. For a small number of attendees there will be the opportunity to learn more about business coaching and just what it can do for you and your business. Before we commit to these meetings we want to make sure that you are the type of people we enjoy working with. Strangely enough the people we enjoy working with also tend to get the best results. Secondly, we want to be certain that you are committed to growing your business, developing your people and becoming the leader you know you can be.

WHAT DO I NEED TO DO TO SECURE MY FREE PLACE(S)

You have three options:

Secure the places yourself at https://mpcfourstages.eventbrite.com select a date that suits you & book your place/s

Phone our office on 0151 348 1202 and one of our team will take care of it for you

Or drop us email at susan@mpcforprofit.com and once again we will take care of it for you.

Come and join us we know you will love it and it will be great to meet you.

 How to get the most from your team meetings…..set the rules!

When I ask business owners the reasons why team meetings are at best infrequent events in their business typical answers I get are ‘Don’t have time,’ ‘To time consuming,’ ‘They’re just not productive,’ or even the golden nugget ‘Death by meeting.’

In the corporate world it is known for managers to have a meetings about meetings so they have pre-meetings and the management becomes locked into the meeting merry go round.

So it’s easy to see why meetings can get a ‘bad press’ yet if you look at really successful teams and businesses, meetings are an integral part of why they are successful in the first place. Which poses the question ‘What are they doing in their meetings that makes them such a success?’

I believe that most owners/managers deep down understand the value of having meetings the challenge is that most turn into at best a chat that has little or no value. Because of the lack of value team members will offer excuses why they can’t attend leading to meetings being cancelled which leads to the belief that they are waste of valuable time.

The best meetings however will align the focus of a team, build trust, drive commitment which will lead to peer to peer accountability and a much bigger focus on the business results.

So how can you hold effective meetings?

Two things that need to be in place to hold effective meetings are:

• A clear understanding of the purpose of the meeting. What is it you want people to do after the meeting?
• Clearly defined rules. There is a presumption that people should know the rules after all its common-sense problem there is common-sense isn’t that common. In the absence of rules people will make up their own.

My focus in this blog is on ways of establishing rules that will lead to more successful and productive meetings.

A simple discussion about agreeing the ground rules is all that’s needed to get the subject out in the open. Here are few areas that will to be considered:

• What are the starting and finishing times of the meeting?
• Who needs to attend the meeting? Who doesn’t need to attend?  
• Who is accountable for recording the minutes and outcomes of the meeting?
• What are the rules regarding laptops, tablets, mobile phones etc?
• What are the toilet break rules?
• What are the rules around interruptions during the meeting?

Bearing in mind that one of the purposes of holding effective meetings is to build trust amongst the team lets look at a typical scenario:

A meeting is booked to start at 10:00 that means that everybody should be in their seats ready to go at 10:00. It does not mean top your coffees up because we are about to start or if need to loo now’s the time to pay a visit or if you have any calls to make now is the time. Two things need to be considered here is how much respect is being paid to those who are organised, arrive on time, bring all the relevant information and are seated ready to go at the assigned time? If this continues to happen what will it do to trust? Also If someone who is vital to the meeting arrives late by ten minutes and there are six other attendees you have just lost one man hour.

What to do next

With your team discuss the rules and the reasons for the rules. Get buy in from the team (not consensus). Ask what will happen if rules are not met. Have the rules drawn up and published to everybody. Revisit them regularly. Make sure that you have 100% participation in sticking to the rules that includes the owner!

Are You Dealing With Under Performing Team Members? Read on...

One of the biggest challenges most business owners face at one time or another is dealing with a team member that isn’t pulling their weight or someone that is performing well below their potential. This can be very frustrating not to mention costly and extremely time-consuming.

As a Business Coach, a question I frequently get asked is “Is it time to move this person on or should I persevere and address the performance issue?” to be honest I prefer to start with the latter because in most cases when you dig a little deeper it isn’t the team members fault. Let me explain…

In a lot of businesses when someone joins the team their induction to the job goes something like; “Here is your desk, this is your computer (providing someone has remembered to order it) any questions just ask Rodney in the next office.” Is it any wonder that problems follow?

Before attempting to employ anybody some questions that need to be asked are; How well defined is the role? How clear are you on what you expect the person to do?” What Key Performance Indicators do you expect the person to meet? What responsibilities will the person have? How clear are the standards you expect the person to perform at? This is not an exhaustive list yet having clarity on these points will increase your chances of successfully integrating somebody into your company. Without them there may be a gap in expectations between you and the team member.

Once you are clear on the role the next step is to get agreement. What you are looking for here is clarity and buy in. “Here are my expectations” to which you want them to reply “Yes I fully understand those expectations.”

Next we need to have in place a system for providing accountability which simply means, how are you going to keep score. This will normally take the form of some kind of KPI or Key Performance Indicators that are activity based, for instance number of business owners spoken too per day or number of sales meetings booked per day.

Business can be quite predictable and once you understand the numbers in your business it is relatively easy to predict the outcome of a team member’s activity or indeed lack of activity. To keep people informed how they are doing you will need some kind of feedback system, be that a daily or weekly one-one, a scoreboard to which people can refer on a regular basis or a group catch up. A key thought here is to catch people doing things right and feedback how awesome that is as opposed to the more usual approach of catching people doing things wrong. The upside of this approach is that they are more likely to repeat the same behaviour.

Occasionally you may need to provide feedback to correct behaviour, helping the person get back on track and have them take responsibility for achieving their agreed upon goals.

You will often find that by introducing the 4 steps above, team member performance will start to improve massively. An added bonus with the process is that the people who are unable to meet your standards will normally leave of their own accord because they realise they are not up to the job.

To recap, apply these four steps to your hiring process and watch your results improve:

• Clearly define the role, responsibilities and expectations.
• Gain agreement to the clarity and buy in from the new team member
• Have a system for accountability to whatever you have agreed.
• Provide regular feedback and if needed correction.

Introducing the above system was one of the biggest wins I made in my early business career, and it led to vastly improved staff retention which of course led to much higher profits.

One final point with this system in place life was a lot less stressful.

If you'd like to discover 'How to build a team culture that, Inspires, Motivates and Thrives in Your Business Join us on Friday 16th June for a morning full of learning and practical ways to grow Your Team, YOUCAN'T GROW A GREAT BUSINESS WITHOUT A GREAT TEAM - GET YOUR TICKET/S HERE