Leadership - Delegation and Desired Outcomes

Delegate Desired Outcomes

Stifling creativity can be a devastating habit for a company.  Avoid this pitfall by abstaining from micromanagement activities.  As an example, consider how you can empower your people’s creativity in how you delegate.Example:  Our Task DescriptionConnect with Mr. Smith to learn of his interest in becoming a client.  He is the president of the company he founded 7 years ago and is may be a someone we can grow with.  Be sure to keep your communications brief as he has limited time to review emails and would like to know the objective of your message immediately.

1. Deliverable: Connect with Mr. Smith…
2. Objectives: …to learn of his interest in becoming a client.
3. Tips: Recognize his role; Note the opportunity to grow with his company; Keep communications brief and focused on objectives

With practice, employing desired outcomes throughout your company will stifle micromanagement and encourage creativity.  Coupling this list with some tips, must dos, and must not dos creates a broader framework for them to deliver innovative results.  Remember, change needs practice… and practice needs patience.

Home Run - Defined

Many breakdowns within a company are related to communication and delegation. With "Project Perspectives", I demonstrated my approach to building an improvement initiative. With "What Does a Home Run Look Like", I am demonstrating how to ensure that the initiative gets completed.

Once the topic is run through "Perspectives", you will have a lot of information that needs to be organized into tasks to be completed. In order for the initiative to be graded, we need to have a set of measurable goals. To develop this list, we build "What does a home run look like".

It should specifically state each part of the project. For example purposes, lets use "Blood From a Turnip". Here Resicom wanted to drive down costs without cutting people, so we created a contest. A Home Run checklist for this could include:

1. All entries to be submitted by... (must have a deadline so that you can have closure)
   
2. Each participant shall prepare all of their entries in a single Microsoft Word document using Helvetica font and 12 point size (consistent format will help limit editing down the line when building a report)
3. Each entry shall have a name that summarizes the initiative
   
4. Each entry shall have a clear description of what your plan would be to get the initiative started (ensuring that more thought is put into the idea and the recipient has some sense of direction for the improvement)
   
5. Each participant shall email me the .doc document by the due date (method for submittal)
6. No entires can involve cutting staff as a method of driving down costs
   

Now each of the people that are participating in the contest have something to be graded against. Not their ideas, which comes later, rather their completion of the task of generating the ideas. I can ask: were they submitted by specified date; were they in the right format; were they submitted with a name and description; were they sent to me in the proper format; were they within the parameters set (anything except cutting people/salaries).

If the answer is yes to all of those items, then the delegation of the tasks was successful. If the tasks were delegated to the right people within your organization, then the quality of the entries should be good. The focus of this posting is the delegation piece, a future posting will be on training, which will focus on the quality piece.

Quick Tip on Delegating Tasks

What does a home run look like? Very easy to understand and describe. When delegating tasks, ask yourself the home run question. For this person you are delegating to hit a home run with the given tasks, they must...

It turns the tasks into small bites of work, each with a picture of what success looks like.

If you can do this consistently, you will find tasks being completed better, faster, therefore, you should be more profitable.