When You’re Out, Is Your Team Able to Function Without You?

The best leaders train and empower their team so others can step up and move projects ahead without hesitation in the leader’s absence. Here is a case study that can help leaders and managers think through the preparation, training and delegation necessary to be away from the office, using a very realistic scenario. (more…)

When delegation isn’t done properly, there can be high costs to both the organization and the individuals involved. Don’t let that happen to you!

Ensuring a successful delegation requires that you fully define/analyze the task ahead of time and think about what will be required of the person to whom it’s assigned. Each of the following should be considered before assigning anything to anyone.

1. What is the task?
-Be sure you can be specific about the task and have all the information you need to help your “delegatee” succeed at it.
-Know why this project needs to be done and why you want to delegate it.
-Know any issues that will have to be analyzed or resolved before the task can be delegated.

2.When is it due?
-Have a specific deadline, and know the consequences of missing it.
-Know how the task might be affected by outside factors, such as upstream tasks that may fall behind schedule.

3.What resources are available?
-Know what supporting resources are available – personnel, documents, etc.
-Be aware of any budgetary constraints on the task.

4. What is the outcome or deliverable?
-What are you looking for as a result – a report, a presentation?
-Figure out how you will measure success.

5. Who is the best person for this task?
-Think about the specific skills and experience that will be required.
-Consider the attitude that will be needed.
-Look at your team – whose skills fit the bill? Who has have the right attitude?
-Once you’ve picked the person, determine if they need any additional training.

Use of these questions will greatly eliminate misunderstandings and misconceptions about the task to be performed and the expected outcomes.

Excerpted from the CRM Learning program, A Leader’s Guide to Delegating.

Need more help in this area? For detailed information on this crucial step in the delegation process (along with several others) we recommend the entire A Leader’s Guide to Delegating program which introduces and illustrates a highly effective five-step delegation model.

Let’s face it: some people hate to delegate and simply don’t trust others to get the work done. Rather than try to skip over these objections and teach people how to delegate, this activity acknowledges these fears and downsides of delegation and balances them against the vast benefits of delegation – to the delegator, the delegate AND the organization.

Objective: This group activity is a great way to uncover people’s fears about delegating while bringing to light its significant benefits. By seeing and discussing the pluses and minuses of delegation, participants open up to learning the right way to delegate (so they avoid the pitfalls).

1) Divide learners into two groups. Explain that each group will have a different assignment. Tell the learners that they need to reflect on their own delegation experiences in this activity. Ask them to identify one person in the group who will take notes and record the group’s comments.

2) Read these instructions to Group 1: “Please list the positive aspects of delegation—why it is important to you personally, the people you supervise, and to your organization. Be sure to look for benefits that can come from the delegation process.”

Read these instructions to Group 2: “Please list the negative aspects of delegation—why people are uncomfortable with delegating and being delegated to, potential risks and impacts for you and the organization, why results are sometimes unsuccessful, and the consequences of NOT delegating and trying to do it all yourself.”

3) Create a flipchart page that looks like this. (If you want, provide a few sample statements to get them started.)

4) Give the groups 10 minutes to complete their discussion. Have each group’s reporter come to the flipchart and list the aspects they identified.

5) Here are some of the answers you might see:

Positive Aspects of Delegation
• Employees and managers discover skills they were not aware of.
• Employees have a chance to succeed.
• You find staff who can take more of the workload in the future.
• People get to contribute.
• Presents an opportunity to share the credit.
• People learn by doing.
• Loyalty and trust are built

Negative Aspects of Delegation
• Micromanaging/hovering creates distrust.
• Employees can feel dumped on.
• Interferes with people’s ego—they don’t want to give up opportunities to receive accolades for completing tasks/ projects on their own.
• Creates situations where a person does all the work but has no authority.
• Other work needs to be put aside when person is delegated to; priorities get confused.

6) Engage the group in a comparison of the responses on the positive and negative sides of the flipchart. Ask some or all of the following questions.
• What impact does delegation have on relationships in the workplace?
• How are you affected as a leader? Are you overworked because you are afraid to delegate?
• How can you delegate smaller tasks without it looking like “dumping?”
• How are your people affected by delegation? Do they have opportunities to reach their potential? Are they developing skills and experience?
• Look at the negative statements—what would it be like to work in an environment where these behaviors and emotions are being expressed?
• How important is trust to the delegation process?

Following the activity, give participants tips on what it takes to be a successful delegator, lead them through a class on the topic or encourage them to do self-study in this area.

This material excerpted from the Facilitator’s Guide to the video program, A Leader’s Guide to Delegating.

Empowerment is different from delegation. Delegation is entrusting a task to a team while still retaining all the decision making control. Empowerment, however, requires that a certain amount of responsibility and decision making capability is vested in the team. Assigning responsibility implies confidence in the team and confidence in its ability to take certain decisions on its own. It gives the team the independence to formulate an action plan and then implement that plan.

Empowered teams can work in several situations; here are some examples of a few:

• Empowered product marketing teams are able to come up with ideas that help create better products and services in line with customer expectations.
• Empowered teams in the services sector can help to bring about greater customer satisfaction and retention levels.
• Empowered sales teams are better at achieving their targets and forming long-term partnerships with clients.

Let’s look at an example of a customer services team at a hotel:

The customer services team is not empowered to handle complaints. When faced with an irate customer, they have to be polite but buy time. They then have to refer back to their supervisor and work out a solution that can appease the customer. When they finally get back to the customer, the customer has his bags packed and is ready to check out to move to a competitor’s hotel!

Let’s now consider an empowered customer services team:

The customer services team is empowered to handle complaints in a particular manner. When faced with an irate customer, the team is empowered to use small promotional methods like discounts, offers or schemes to appease the disgruntled customer. The customer is happy with the offer and the matter is resolved efficiently. The benefits to the company can be enormous since customer retention is likely to go up.

Lack of empowerment can be a functional glass ceiling and it can prove to be a stumbling block especially for teams that front organizations in customer services or client relations.

Lack of empowerment can also slow down the work flow because the decision making is vested higher up the hierarchy. A certain amount of authority and decision making leeway helps improve work efficiency and also ensures that a team takes pride in its existence.

If the team is empowered to make some of the decisions, this empowerment becomes an enabling force and positively impacts the efficiency and revenues of the organization. Many companies have reaped tangible benefits by using empowerment as an “enabling force”.
Reprinted from Team Building, www.teambuildingportal.com

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Team empowerment can prove to be completely ineffective and meaningless if an organization does not support empowerment with a few key factors:

Inadequate Investment in Training and Development: Training and development is an essential ingredient for the effectiveness of team empowerment so that the team is geared to take on the challenge of their new role. Without training the members to the standard they are expected to deliver it is unlikely the team will produce the results desired.

 Inadequate Access to Information and Other Resources: Without access to the latest information an empowered team will not be able to make quick decisions. If they don’t have adequate financial, technological or human resources at their disposal then they can’t implement their decisions properly. Even technical experts within the company are an important resource. For example, if sales teams can invite company experts such as engineers who have direct knowledge of the product to important sales meetings, it might help them immensely in closing the deal. If they have access to a CRM database they can create better selling strategies and even design innovative sales approaches like upselling, cross selling or bundling.

Inadequate Guidelines on Empowerment: Empowerment requires a company to provide a framework within which the empowered team is allowed to act on its own. Inadequate guidelines can lead to ineffective unstable teams if they are given too much power without proper direction or control. It can lead to chaos and losses for the company when the team begins to make decisions that adversely affect the company. It is therefore essential to clearly establish the level of autonomy that the teams actually have. There has to be some amount of decision making scope and clear guidelines on the extent of power.

Inadequate Encouragement and Support: The senior manager has to be prepared to allow some of the decision making to be passed to the members of the team. In some cases this may actually be favored by the senior manager freeing him up to do other things. However, some managers may be reluctant to pass control or power to someone else, either though issues of control or a lack of trust in the teams ability. The senior manager has to be willing to give up a certain amount of control and display confidence and commitment in the team process and in the team’s ability to handle its new responsibility.

Empowered teams have been the rage in the corporate world since the nineties, and it is now proven that teams that are equipped to work on their own bring in greater efficiency.

The other facet of empowerment is the human angle – individuals on empowered teams feel greater satisfaction with their jobs. It’s a sense of importance and pride in doing your bit in the overall scheme of things that creates a sense of well being. It also helps people grow, think independently and explore their full potential.
Reprinted from Team Building, www.teambuildingportal.com

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by Charles R. McConnell

The term “empowerment” rose to prominence in the late 1980s and saw considerable use through the 1990s in conjunction with the total quality management (TQM) movement. Its use has been so widespread that the term itself has become a buzzword. We’re told repeatedly that we must empower employees to enable them to make their best possible contributions to organizational success; we’re told this as though it were something new, some late-twentieth-century discovery.

The verb “empower” contains its own simple definition: to give power to. A look into any dictionary or thesaurus reveals that one of the several synonyms for “empowerment” is “delegation.” A similar look at “delegation” shows “empowerment” as a synonym. Delegation and empowerment have essentially the same meaning, yet many present day experts tell us: Don’t just delegate to employees–empower them.

Although empowerment may be described in a variety of ways, its essence remains giving employees control of their jobs and letting them make their own decisions and solve their own problems. Therefore, there’s no difference between empowerment and proper delegation. Therein lies the problem; delegation has been so widely misused and abused that the term itself has become hopelessly tarnished. The conscientious delegating manager—or honest empowering manager—clearly defines employees’ limits and keeps hands off as long as they operate within these limits and deliver the expected results.

Although delegation and empowerment have essentially the same meaning, in practice they’ve been viewed quite differently. With empowerment’s prominence as a buzzword, some people are behaving as though this concept is a vast improvement over mere delegation. But if the concepts are really identical, what happened to delegation?

What happened to delegation took decades of regarding it as little more than assigning work to employees. Proper delegation, however, has always consisted of making workers responsible for task completion and also giving them the resources and authority required to complete the tasks. True empowerment is identical to proper delegation: you give an employee a problem to solve or a task to complete, specify the desired outcome, and provide the authority and resources necessary to get the job done.

The problem at the heart of most difficulties with delegation—or empowerment—is a problem of management style and approach, and it’s a control issue with those managers who have difficulty surrendering control over task performance. Some managers can’t let go sufficiently to allow delegation or empowerment to work. Their still-authoritarian management style sends a contradictory message to employees: You’re free to do whatever you need to do, as long as it’s the same thing we would do.

Whether it’s called delegation or empowerment, the process will work as intended only if the manager commits in advance to accepting the employees decisions and results. Sound risky? Sure it does; as a manager you remain responsible for the results your employees achieve, so you have a strong interest in making certain they do what they’re supposed to do (surely this is why so many managers are reluctant to relinquish any measure of control).

To truly empower employees:

·              Know your employees well. Know their strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, and limitations. Know what they can and can’t do; know them well enough to be able to judge which of them should be given what assignments.

·              Teach them what to do and how to do it. This is one of the weakest points in the delegation process as usually practiced; some managers tend to make an assignment and move on with inadequate attention to preparing the employee, when in reality this step can be time-consuming. The manager’s “reward” of time saved comes well in the future; to save time in the future usually requires spending more time in the present.

·              Provide all the authority necessary for task completion. Empowered employees should command all the resources needed to get the job done.

·              Define limits and expectations. This is crucial; employees need to know precisely the results you’re looking for and how far they can go in achieving those results. Focus on results; within reason, you needn’t be concerned with all the steps taken to achieve those results.

·              Turn them loose. Once you feel that they know what’s to be done, when it’s to be done, and what results are expected, let them do it.

·              Be available to provide advice and assistance as needed, but let them come to you. Don’t hover and don’t micromanage. Don’t intrude uninvited unless you see something going so wrong that it can’t be left alone.

In brief, true employee empowerment consists of educating employees in specific essential tasks, giving them what they need to get the job done, defining expected results, and turning them loose and staying out of their way unless your help becomes essential.

Reprinted with permissions from the The National Federation of Independent Business website, www.nfib.com 

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