Delegating & Executing

The leader, by definition, should delegate, providing autonomy but also enabling teams to succeed since the leader remains accountable for the team’s performance. We aspire to have self-managed organizations where leaders work behind the scenes, encouraging autonomy and empowering teams to perform and shine.

The role of a leader is to enable autonomy by coaching and aligning the team but also being ready to step up when needed to support, handle conflicts, and remove obstacles that the team can’t deal with. The leader should be able to answer questions such as: Why do you delegate? To whom do you delegate what? To what extent? How much autonomy? How much do you monitor? How much do you intervene? How big a risk are you willing to take for failures?

How much you delegate depends on your team (Cosmos), the urgency of the situation (Chronos), and of course, on you (your Character). Assuming that you do not have a Character problem in delegating, the other 2 are crucial.

To succeed, people in the team should be self-motivated and capable of assuming responsibility, committing, and performing. It’s a blessing to have direct reports who are keen and capable of assuming more responsibility and growing fast.

There is a widespread illusion that bosses fear delegating while people are enthusiastic to assume responsibility and do more work. This is not always the case.

In reality, some of your direct reports will be keen and capable of assuming responsibility, while others will be capable but not keen. Then, others will be keen but not capable, and others might be neither keen nor capable.

For some people, autonomy can be inspiring, boosting their performance. For others, who prefer guidance, autonomy will make them stressed. Some will hate it, seeing it as an additional workload and risk.

What is delegated is also important. Usually, bosses delegate monotonic and tedious tasks rather than glamorous ones, such as attending an important event or dining with a celebrity. Naturally, teams might not appreciate everything that is delegated to them.

Fundamental to successful autonomy and collaboration is self-motivation but also providing clarity related to the team’s mission, and goals, the distinctive roles they play, how they can serve each other the best, which decisions require approval, and which are not. To improve speed and autonomy, the usual practice is that approval is automatically granted if the informed leader doesn’t reject it or doesn’t react.

Providing autonomy, leaders usually face the challenge: should we step in and mentor the teams when we see something wrong, or should we let them manage the situation even if we foresee a failure? Here are 4 examples:

• Should you let your executives struggle to get a license for the next project, or should you step up to speed up the process?

• Should you get involved in forcing the team to replace an unreliable vendor, or should you rely on my team’s judgment that the vendor is great?

• Should you highlight the shortbacks you see in planning the new product launch, or should you let the team execute as planned so that they don’t see you patronizing them?

• Should you challenge the event manager on the insufficient plan for the exhibition, or should you focus on other priorities instead of micromanaging the event manager?
  

When delegating, leaders should also invest a lot of time coaching, developing, and supporting the team, aligning the team, correcting the issues that the team created, managing escalation or failures, and still becoming hands-on when needed, or even micromanaging your team if you have no better choice (not enough time to improve the team).

A big problem for organizations in the last decade is that many leaders delegate and provide freedom to the team, but they don’t coach and support the team. Even worse, they think that they are not accountable for their teams’ behavior and performance! Instead, they finger-point the team members as responsible when the shit hits the fan.

This is a major misunderstanding, which probably derives from the bibliography that, while preaches and promotes autonomy and delegation, it fails to emphasize enough of the time and effort needed by a leader who delegates and the fact that bosses remain accountable for the performance of their team and leaders.

So, it’s not enough for leaders to have a positive mindset in delegating.

They should also have the capabilities and capacity for the required workload to succeed.

If the team is keen and capable of taking responsibility, you should delegate. If not, you better take a hands-on approach. In those cases, the one-man show becomes unavoidable.

In short missions, changing resources and/or people (hiring, firing, coaching) is usually impossible. You need to perform with whatever is in place, affording only minor changes.

While delegation and autonomy may bring many benefits, it also creates many challenges, such as failures and investing more time in coaching.  So, it’s always wise to consider how delegation benefits the organization in each specific situation: time saved for the leader? speed to action? developing a new generation of leaders? We shouldn’t forget that we delegate in order to perform better. Not to perform worse.

While delegating is mandatory in leading, it’s also important to

ISOROPIN the right level of autonomy and delegation in order to execute. Cosmos and Chronos could dictate different priorities.