Episode Details

Today we dive into High Performance Teams, Part 10. This is the final episode in the people pillar and so far we have discussed the right people, the right role, the right strategic development plans for them and the right coaching and one-to-ones.

So now you've got the right people on the bus, got them all sitting in the right seats, you're developing them all in the right way over their entire career, looking to develop them and make them into the best people they can be.

You're also actively coaching and giving them one-to-ones. Today wet finish the people pillar with a focus on the execution part of the job through situational delegation. As new initiatives and tasks come up on a day-to-day basis, this is different to our coaching and one-to-ones. This is when something pops up that is above and beyond business as usual like a special report, a new project and the quality of your delegation will directly impact the quality of performance of your people.

Back in about 2006 I was a Project Manager leading a major programme at work across the state government, and I had a fantastic, very high performing Business Analyst that worked for me. And on a Friday afternoon I got a call from the project board chair saying that on the Monday during my project board meeting, I was going to have to present an update on a particular part of this project and my Business Analyst was leading that. So I called him and said "Hey mate, can you put together a quick report for me on how that particular part of the project is going?" It was all about the requirements we're developing and the solution he was gonna propose.

And you know what happened, I had the weekend off. I had a wonderful time, came in Monday morning, and there was about a 15 page report in my inbox waiting for me and I thought "Oh my God, this is ... I just wanted one page." I went over to him and said "Hey mate, what's this? This is too big. I needed one page." And he goes "Oh man, you said you wanted a report."

And you know what? It dawned on me, my delegation or the way that I described this task to him was just terrible. It was just off the cuff, I didn't put any thought into it. I thought he would just understand. But you know what? He spent most of his weekend putting this together, he was so worried about it. And it was just such poor delegation on my part, it's really, really stuck with me.

Something

important for all of us to remember is that if you're getting work coming back to you that isn't what you expect, the very first person you should look at is you. Just get a sense and try and recall the quality of your delegation. Because if you just put an extra 10% effort into your delegation, I guarantee, you're likely to get about a 50% return on that.

Delegation is where a lot of leaders fall victim to their natural preferences. You might remember very early on in the Inner Chief we spoke about micromanagers and even the opposite, when your boss is in the clouds or a macromanager for wont of a better term. The thing is, delegation is very situational, and the biggest pitfall here is that if you have one approach to delegating in all situations, that becomes your MO or when your task comes through, you've got a way of just flicking it on to someone or just handing it over to someone without any framework or any thought into how you're going to communicate that.

From time to time you will succeed, but a lot of the time, you'll get sub-par results. As an example, let's just say you had a high performer in your team, and you have a very low risk task, and you're naturally someone that is a bit of a micromanager. You're a bit stressed about the quality