Let your people g(r)o(w)

When I became aware of how bad we are at delegation, every conversation was haunted by the Ghost of Delegation.

(Think of the Ghost of Delegation as the restless collective spirit of all our failed efforts at delegating, of all the ‘delegations that might have been’.)

There was this conversation with the manager who complained about her incompetent staff.

“You can’t get the staff these days,” was something she said quite a lot.

On this occasion she described how she’d asked an employee to do something, which she calculated should take an hour.

But it took him four hours, and he did it wrong.

So she spent an hour telling him about how it should be done, before going off and doing it herself, which took an hour.

Then she spent an hour with her boss discussing the issue (complaining), a conversation that produced no constructive result.

Added up, the whole thing consumed eight hours of company time when it should have taken one.

“You can’t get the staff these days,” she said.

Before I could respond, the Ghost of Delegation was whispering in my ear.

“Really?” it said. “How many opportunities is she giving her people to grow in competence and earn her trust? Is this a competence problem or a delegation problem?”

Clients chuckle when I tell them this: ruefully, because it’s such a common occurrence.

Could it help explain poor productivity?

Dave’s new book is out: Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time. For more on that, head on over to here: Deep and Deliberate Delegation or check out on Amazon