Free Up Your Time As A Leader
One key role any leader or manager plays is supervising their direct reports. Part of your job is to ensure that people complete their work effectively and appropriately.
However, many leaders struggle to determine how much they should or can delegate to their team members without worrying about whether the task or job will be completed correctly and on time. The risks involved might prevent them from delegating in the first place.
On the other hand, leaders might delegate by name only. Instead, they micromanage the issue, which causes people to chafe at having the boss constantly looking over their shoulders, while forcing managers to spend time on oversight that could be better spent on more valuable activities.
You must consider the relationship between management and training to solve this delegation puzzle.
Let me explain what I mean.
Escaping The Micromanagement Trap
One of the significant reasons leaders might hesitate before delegating a task is that they don’t believe the person can do the job well. The more you, as a leader, lack trust in the person’s skills, experience, or talent, the less likely you are to delegate.
If you find yourself stuck in a trap of micromanaging your people, the missing link could be a lack of training.
By that same argument, the more you trust that person’s skills and training, the more aggressively you will consider delegating, coupled with less of a need to provide any oversight to ensure the job gets done satisfactorily.
That means the more training you provide someone, which could include classroom work, cross-training, and coaching, the more aggressively you can delegate to them.
Put simply: training up your people is your shortcut to escaping the micromanagement trap.
Reallocating Your Time
Investing in training your people is a great way to provide developmental opportunities for them to advance in their careers; it’s also an opportunity to free up more of your time to work on higher-value or more strategic issues.
As I wrote in my book, Great CEOs Are Lazy, the more time you spend working on the point of constraint in your business—the kink in the hose, if you will—the more value you are creating for your organization.
Micromanaging your people’s oversight is not an activity that will generate the highest economic impact on your business. However, coaching your people to their highest level can have a profoundly positive effect on the company and your time.
I recall when I was president of a business and ran the weekly operations meeting. I saw an opportunity to delegate that job to my operations lead, Bob. I had been running this critical meeting for a long time. So, I began by investing a few hours with Bob, explaining the different variables he might encounter hosting the meeting as I had experienced over the years.
I then had him watch me closely as I ran the next meeting, after which we held a debriefing session where he shared his observations with me. The following week, I had Bob run the meeting. We sat down again to debrief, but this time I shared a few observations and coaching tips with him.
The week after, I only sat in the meeting as an observer. I never attended another operations meeting after that, which saved me an enormous amount of time —several hours every month, given the prep time involved in running the meeting. I then reinvested those hours in high-leverage activities, such as researching acquisitions and new product opportunities, adding far more value to the business than my presence in that weekly meeting.
A Lack of Education
A key lesson for leaders is that if you spend time on tasks that you know you should be delegating, you may not have a talent problem, but rather a lack of training or education.
I recall a case involving a CEO I worked with, who complained about his CFO and how he struggled to close the books every month. The CEO was required to participate in the work each month, an activity that did not contribute to the company’s value.
However, when we examined the issue together, we discovered that the constraint wasn’t that the CFO couldn’t do the work. The constraint was that the CEO wanted things done in a certain way, and he never spent the time to train his CFO to do it that way.
The CEO was trapped in the CFO’s job, which was his fault since he hadn’t invested in getting his CFO up to speed.
So, let that be a lesson to you. If you find yourself stuck doing jobs you know you shouldn’t be doing but cannot delegate them, the problem might start with you.
The way out of this trap is to double down on your investments in training and educating your people, which will increase your confidence in their ability to get work done correctly.
