Leadership Voyage

S4E10: This is the Way: Delegate Without Micromanaging

• Jason Wick • Season 4 • Episode 10

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Jason talks about Leading By Example versus Delegating. There's meaning and benefits in doing it yourself, but there are also effective ways to delegate to your team that free you as the leader/manager up (and give your folks growth opportunities!).

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Leadership Voyage
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Wherever you are on your leadership voyage, it starts here. Hey everybody, welcome back to Leadership Voyage, the podcast dedicated to your pursuit of becoming a great leader. My name is Jason Wick, your host, and I'm very happy to be here for season 4, episode 10. Once again, it's great that season 4 is going full steam ahead, having many guests and many other topics to discuss things here about leadership management and otherwise. Uh, if you want to get in touch with the show, please email me, Jason Wick, startyougmail.com. Uh, I'd love to hear what you think so far about the different topics. Which of them have landed for you? Which do you wish had never aired? I'd love to hear about that. If you have ideas for guests, um, let me know. Honestly, right now I have a backlog of 11 or 12 guests who have reached out that I am behind on, uh, getting in touch with. So, thank you to everyone who is recommending folks to come be on the program and uh, we'll see how many of them can make it on the show. Some are a great fit, some are not, but that's okay. So today we are going to talk about delegation and it's going to be an interesting journey here. We're going to have a few different parts. First we're going to talk about this Wall Street Journal article that I ran across. Uh it it was in March actually um about delegation uh more on a personal level actually and I think you'll find this pretty interesting and and somewhat entertaining as well. Then we'll talk about managers and the ideas around delegating and what are the other options compared to delegation. And then finally we will get into how to delegate and I'm going to use a Forbes article for that. And I think you're going to get a lot of takeaways for how to delegate effectively as a manager coming out of this third section. So do not uh do not do not uh what am I trying to say? stick around to the end. Thank you. That's what I'm trying to say. All right. So, delegation is the topic at hand today. And there's this article in the Wall Street Journal. Uh again, I know some of you probably are not subscribers, but uh for me, I do have a a digital subscription. And this was called Why I've Become More Mindful About What I Delegate. The author is Mosha Bar. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Mosha Bar, who is a neuroscientist in Israel and also works at Massachusetts General Hospital. And this article is quite personal in nature, but feeds into a book that they've written recently, I think. So, I want to tell you about this story. The link is in the show notes, but the author starts off talking about having built a treehouse about 15 years ago. I think that their kids were teenagers. Building a treehouse was one of the most fulfilling thing they'd ever done despite having limited carpentry skills. And that the intensive part of working on this project, which took about a year, brought unexpected joy even though uh it was extremely difficult. And now the children are older and they're all so nostalgic about this um uh treehouse that they're all getting tattoos of it. Now, if that doesn't get your attention in a first paragraph, I don't know what will, but it got my attention. So, the author starts to talk about what's called the IKEA effect. And the IKEA effect was also covered in the Wall Street Journal about four years ago, July 1st, 2021. And what the IKEA effect describes is essentially the idea that when we put effort into something, we become attached and our feelings around that thing are more positive. So if you start to think about IKEA, they always make us put the the furniture together, right? And I'm not talking about clicking two pieces together underneath. You are putting that darn thing together. Uh my wife and I have joked that the closest we'd ever gotten to being divorced is putting together IKEA furniture. But maybe in the spirit of this, you think back and go, "Huh, think about how difficult that was. Now we value it. Boy, it was almost impossible to get that frame attached to the wall, but we did it." And now because of that, we have pride in it and have a more positive uh uh impression or a positive feeling towards what it is that we put together. So, getting back on track here, the author shares an anecdote about a cooking class where a teenage daughter said that this was the most delicious meal they'd ever tasted. You know, talking about the investment you maybe put into making something yourselves and all of that. So we then switch to some of the research and some of the um the trends that have come come around in the in the past year or so and the author talks about in some cases people are having a diminished excitement even though they're busy. Okay, they're busy doing stuff but they're not as excited about what they're doing. They're they're kind of losing their spark. And personally for the author, that was what their own family member told them. They then write a little bit about Jewish law, which frankly I know nothing about. So I'm just uh repeating from the article here. But delegation in Jewish law, certain things are allowed to be delegated and other things are not allowed to be delegated. particularly when it's something where your experience in that is important and matters. So the author goes on to talk more about the observations in in his own life. But let's skip ahead to kind of what what this all means, right? There's this thing called behavioral activation. And that's the link between actions and feelings and engagement and fulfillment. And it's been used as a treatment for depression. Go back and do the things you used to enjoy and see what the effects are. And in some case that's been just as effective as talking to another person about your struggles. So by staying active uh in purposeful activities it can improve resilience uh decrease depression reduce dementia all these things in the brain research etc etc okay so great stuff of course to hear there but here's the point is and I'm going to step aside for a second here back in another life I had this really strange job of working as a personal assistant to a family that was wealthy And it always was interesting to see the things that they would outsource, okay, versus the things that they would do themselves. And I've always thought, "Oh, weird." But then I go, "Oh, well, maybe that that's enabling them to spend more time with their family and do the, you know, spend time with the people they love. I don't want to do grocery shopping, so I'm going to have someone else do it." And then that'll enables me to spend time with my kids doing this other thing after school rather than grocery shopping. Things like this. Okay. But it's saying here that think about the tasks that you might delegate. Cooking, washing your car, uh mowing the lawn, things like that. and prioritize projects where the experience of that process feels important to you. Even if it feels like uh it's just one of the 20 things I have to do every week at home, you say, "Who has the time to do that?" You know, depending on your life. Well, if it's something fulfilling and the experience of the process is important, yeah, you have the time to do it. you can prioritize the time to do that. Maybe you like to go out in the grocery store, find the items on the shelf, put them in, and check out with the human being, which is kind of the opposite of the trend we've seen, right? If anything, you're seeing more and more families get their groceries delivered by a person who drops it off at the front door and they never see their face, right? Maybe you like kind of the mindlessness of going through the grocery store aisle and finding the stuff and putting it in the cart and then smiling at that person, checking it out and saying thank you to them and telling them to have a fantastic afternoon or evening. Maybe that is something that you've lost sight of, right? Maybe it's something you'd like to do. And I think that's the point of this article by Mosha is delegating things isn't always what's best for you, even if it saves you quote unquote time. And so I can't resist lately, right? I've been loving to scroll down and read some of the comments on a lot of these Wall Street Journal articles in particular. And here's what I want to tell you all. The most commonly discussed thing in here is mowing the lawn. Sure, it takes 45 minutes. Who has the time to do it, right? If you have the money and the means, have someone else do it. However, the most common thing in these comments is talking about people doing that. You can see the results of it. The lawn looks nice. It's also 45 minutes of time where your mind is doing something entirely different. you know, uh, mowing the lawn is kind of like, uh, uh, walking or kind of like driving. There's like this other part of your brain that kicks in and you're like thinking in a different way while while still being focused and able to concentrate on the task that you're the task at hand. And so very very interesting to read some of the things in the way people react to this. And unlike most social media, many almost all of the responses to this article are actually quite positive and I found that interesting, right? Uh very very cool. So check that article out. Uh Mosha Bar, Wall Street Journal, why I've become more mindful about what I delegate. Okay, next section. Let's shift over to managers. Sorry, I had to grab a drink there for a second. But let's switch over to managers. Do you know that uh 23% uh so for my consulting business that I have with uh Sonia Burk who was a guest on this show earlier in the uh season 4 talking about um micromanagement check excuse me not micromanagement about uh imposttor syndrome. Check that episode out if you haven't. season 4, episode 4 about imposter syndrome. But our business that we have together, 23% of people have said that delegating ineffectively is the costliest mistake new managers make. That's what our data tells us. So delegating, what do you delegate? How do you do it? I guess by definition you just say delegation is taking pieces of work and giving it to someone else, right? But I want to add a balanced thought here for a manager thinking about not only how do they manage their own workload but how do they develop their employees and in this idea of development I'd like to propose two different perhaps opposite approaches to helping develop their employees. One would be leading by example. Take on the work that you think is meaningful. Even if you have a chance to delegate that, do it yourself instead. And set a clear standard through the demonstration that you put on. I think there's a time and a place for this, especially if you have newer employees. We all look to the leader, right? For better or for worse. We see their behaviors, their actions, and we see that as a representation of what their standards are. If you let weak performance go, you don't have high standards. If you micromanage everybody and are looking over their shoulders, you don't trust your team. The actions of the leader are what actually matter. Right? So if we're going to develop employees, we've got two halves here. Lead by example, which is to set a clear standard through actually doing the work. And then the other side of it would be to delegate, offload some of the work. But I will argue here rather than thinking about delegation as a way to manage your own time as a manager which hey there are cases for this right. Think of it of of think of it as a way to empower your employees and your teams and to stretch their capabilities. I'm not going to play the clip this time, but back in season two, I was so lucky to talk to Liz Wisman and she talked about stretch, how important stretch is to help people grow. And so, think about that. Do the work and lead by example. That provides a clear model for your team to grow. And do it that way. Delegate. empower others with stretch opportunities that enables them to figure it out on their own. Both of these are good things. That's what I want to say. They're both positive ways to approach developing your employees. And the context is probably what matters. If you're the manager looking to find meaning and fulfillment, maybe you want to take on some of that work you aren't normally doing. Following the spirit of this delegation article we just read back from March. Think about it. There's no philosophy that just stands the test of time forever and works in a vacuum. We have to modify it for our context. Have to be situationally aware. But let's say we want to delegate which is the point of this episode right? If we want to delegate, how are we going to do that effectively? As I said, the definition sounds simple enough, right? Is it just, okay, I have the list of work to do. I'm going to give it to my employees. And that's where this article comes in from March 21st in Forbes called The Power of Letting Go, Why Delegation Drives Organizational Success by Cheryl Robinson. And let me scroll to the bottom. Yes, Cheryl Robinson. That's correct. And I'll have a link to the uh article in the show notes as always. So, you should have a link to the Wall Street Journal and a link to Forbes uh for both of these. So, what the heck does it mean to delegate? Well, and the way that Dr. Robinson starts this article out, she says there's a problem with micromanagement. We all kind of go, "Duh, right?" But I think what she outlines quickly here is when you delegate, the trap is micromanagement. And I love this idea. There's a blind spot. Remember I said lead by example versus delegate and both are positive. Well, what if you delegate but then unintentionally go and tell them how to do it? And that's a theme that's been coming up more and more with the clients that we've been working with in these last couple of months is this idea that well, I'm under pressure. I've got work to do and I've got employees and the the path of least resistance is to show them how to do it. And that's not inherently wrong, right? But remember, the trap is micromanagement. So, how do you delegate without micromanaging? Uh, Cheryl Rob Cheryl Robinson quickly makes, you know, some of the points we all know. Um, when you micromanage, uh, morale goes down, productivity goes down, turnover goes up. Don't forget this one. It creates bottlenecks because often you get dependent on the leader for approvals and it just it it signals through the actions a lack of trust. So all really important things to remember about micromanagement. But she introduces the topic here with this concept of strategic delegation. So what does strategic delegation do? Well, when you delegate day-to-day tasks, it often allows leaders to be, excuse me, to be more available for strategy. High impact activi high impact activities like vision and growth. Okay. It can maximize the leader value, right? leaders bring value to the to the uh organization because they want to make the best use of their time in terms of keeping the organization moving forward and I follow that piece as well. You can empower your team and build trust when you strategically delegate, but it requires a willingness to step back. And that's where this idea of look out for the micromanagement angle is really important. Now, when I talked to William Davis just a couple of episodes ago, he had a really good uh little bit to say about when you have someone else doing some work, it might not look like the way you would have done it. And I want to play this clip from a couple of episodes ago just to remind everybody that when you delegate and you don't micromanage, you're going to have to deal with the fear that's brought out in this article that the work may not be done right. Now, I personally have had, you know, quote unquote leaders who, you know, their their purpose was to, you know, get as much out of me as as can, but then the first time I did something that they didn't agree with, you know, oh, well, you're doing it wrong. Well, you know, no, I'm doing it my way. I'm not doing it the way you would do it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. So I I never, you know, when I deal with somebody, I never go to them and say, 'Well, you're doing this wrong. You know, my question is, what what did you do or how did you do or why did you do again wanting to hear the reasoning for what their decisionmaking went through, right? And how they got there. And then you can work through the nuances of okay, have you thought about this or have you know again leading them through the process of you're trying to help them not condemn them. So William says it better than I could right somebody's doing something a certain way it may not be the way that you did it. And that is that's what is coming out in this article right here um in Forbes by Cheryl Robinson. And again, why is someone doing the task? That's the important part for them to understand or or why the why. Sorry, I just lost my mind for like 20 seconds everybody. Sorry about that. The why behind the work that they're doing. That's the thing to understand, right? And then you have to recognize that the how we get that work done might be different than you envisioned. But the author here in Forbes, this is what she's pointing out. The shift in your mindset is crucial. You have to overcome the fear that the work won't be done right. You can't think no one can do this like me. You have to think someone can do this just as well. You know what? They might even do it better if they have the right support, the right guidance, the right systems. They might do it differently, but it doesn't mean it's wrong. Now, maybe they do something wrong, but that's what William's getting at. Understand their thinking, guide them to what matters, help them improve. That's the fantastic part of all this. It's going to be a little rocky probably for you as the manager first and foremost as you give up that trust or give up that control, excuse me, and give out trust. So, what are the principles for delegating effectively? How do we do this? How do we find this utopian strategic delegation that the author is talking about? Well, the good news is she talks about five principles and this is what you can take away with you. If you're going to choose to delegate as opposed to do the tasks yourself, here is the way to do it. Number one, know your own strengths and weaknesses. Focus on what you excel at and delegate the tasks you can do more efficiently. I might even add based on the first article we had from the Wall Street Journal today about delegation with the personal stories, might even add the things that you love, you might even want to continue doing, right? Maybe they aren't highest value tasks, but maybe you truly enjoy them. And I think that's worth considering. It can give you higher job satisfaction. So, think about that as a manager. Focus on what you excel at, what you love doing, and then delegate tasks that others can do more efficiently. Second principle, choose the right person. Mask the tasks that you're delegating with someone's skills and interest. And as Liz Wisman said, maybe also that would stretch them. Find that right opportunity for stretching, which is fantastic for all your team members. Third, set clear expectations. Right? We already said help them understand the why, but be specific about the goals of the work, the timeline for the work, and what are the desired outcomes for that work. Fourth, we're almost there, folks. Fourth, provide the resources and support. Give them the tools uh and give them the information, the context they need, and also I would add to that the emotional support. You don't have to do this perfectly. Let's check in along the way. Let's see how it's going. That's not micromanaging. That's supporting and getting involved in maximizing your role as their manager. And then fifth, the fifth principle for effective delegation, avoiding micromanagement. Resist the urge to hover over these people's work. Schedule check-ins for guidance, but don't take over. Follow William Davis's lead, the the uh clip we just played. Understand why they're doing what they're doing. They might even have had a better way than you were doing. So there we go folks. Oh no, there was one thing I forgot. There was a LinkedIn post by Liz Kieran who's an executive consultant uh on LinkedIn. This one is from June somewhere during June time frame. Liz Kieran posted this and I wanted to read it to you all. It says, "Shocker. Your team's biggest breakthrough might happen when you're sipping cocktails on a beach. I know. I know. The inbox will explode. things will fall through the cracks and someone will definitely need you for that urgent thing that only you can handle. But as one of my executive coaching clients recently shared with me, something pretty magical happens when the boss is away. And then she outlines four different things in this post uh about what happens when the boss is away. And I wanted to add this last little tidbit at the end because going on PTO, FTO, vacation, whatever you call it, creates an opportunity for others to step in and do the work without you even delegating. They just have to do it. And that's an opportunity. I think there's some nuance to it, but I love the message around it. Liz Kieran's, check her out on LinkedIn if you haven't uh already. Okay, everybody. In the spirit of the first article around uh you know doing the things that you want uh that bring you some meaning, I am going to go clean the tile in my bathroom shower. Uh how's that for something to uh find a little skin in the game that will bring you meaning and enjoy that clean shower the next time I jump in it. All right. Uh otherwise, you find something interesting that you want to do, something small you want to get back to finding fulfillment in. And when it comes to managing, you've got a nice recipe here. You can lead by example or delegate. And when you delegate, you can follow the five principles outlined in that Forbes article. All right, everybody. It's been a great episode. Thanks for sticking with it. And until next time everybody take care.