This piece is tailor-made for you, if you are the hardworking, just-promoted manager who has discovered that the skills needed in the job of a manager are completely different from those required as a doer!
Good frontline sellers and workers have been known to fizzle out when promoted to a man-management role simply because they could not do the one thing every manager needs to do to survive – delegate.
So what is this delegation thing all about?Let’s look at reasons why we should delegate:
Look at your cost of time. Do this quick calculation. Take your annual salary in cost to company terms.
Double it to account for overheads. Divide by 12 months, 25 working days per month and 10 hours of time per day to get the cost of one hour of your time.
Now do the same calculation for your subordinate. Chances are the difference would be a ratio of one half or one third. For the sake of calculation, let’s take one third.
Compare the difference in productivity between you and him/her. Maybe they take twice as much time to write the same report you do. But their cost of time is one-third of yours.
Multiply the two and you have a situation where even if your subordinate takes slightly less than three times the amount of time you take to do the same job, he is still more productive that you are!
Period. This is the clearest case on why you should delegate.
So, if by now you are convinced you need to delegate, this is how the best managers practise it:
• Start delegating unimportant things first, what Stephen Covey calls the Quadrant III activities. Act as if they are very important. This way, even if there is a goof-up, the loss is not too major and your subordinates will feel important.
• Delegate well in advance; about a week is fine. Follow up every day.
• Standardise work processes. People make mistakes because they don’t know how a job is to be done.
• Train people well. After all, even you were not smart when you joined the company!
As they say: ‘If people were capable of doing all the things that you want them to do and they were doing them well, would they continue to work for you for the kind of salary that you are paying them?’ Think about it.
Good frontline sellers and workers have been known to fizzle out when promoted to a man-management role simply because they could not do the one thing every manager needs to do to survive – delegate.
So what is this delegation thing all about?Let’s look at reasons why we should delegate:
Look at your cost of time. Do this quick calculation. Take your annual salary in cost to company terms.
Double it to account for overheads. Divide by 12 months, 25 working days per month and 10 hours of time per day to get the cost of one hour of your time.
Now do the same calculation for your subordinate. Chances are the difference would be a ratio of one half or one third. For the sake of calculation, let’s take one third.
Compare the difference in productivity between you and him/her. Maybe they take twice as much time to write the same report you do. But their cost of time is one-third of yours.
Multiply the two and you have a situation where even if your subordinate takes slightly less than three times the amount of time you take to do the same job, he is still more productive that you are!
Period. This is the clearest case on why you should delegate.
So, if by now you are convinced you need to delegate, this is how the best managers practise it:
• Start delegating unimportant things first, what Stephen Covey calls the Quadrant III activities. Act as if they are very important. This way, even if there is a goof-up, the loss is not too major and your subordinates will feel important.
• Delegate well in advance; about a week is fine. Follow up every day.
• Standardise work processes. People make mistakes because they don’t know how a job is to be done.
• Train people well. After all, even you were not smart when you joined the company!
As they say: ‘If people were capable of doing all the things that you want them to do and they were doing them well, would they continue to work for you for the kind of salary that you are paying them?’ Think about it.