Organizing Your Day

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

Life is complex. We all have multiple responsibilities, some simple and some complicated. Not many of us can carry the whole load ourselves. Nor should we. Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto. Failure to delegate appropriately will wear you out and will stifle the progress of what you want to do. Effective delegation is one of the big keys to success whether it is in your home or business. Delegation pays off because it releases your time responsibilities so you can do things more appropriate to your abilities, things others can’t do. At the same time, by mentoring others, you are helping them build their skills.

• Tasks. Sometimes it is appropriate to maintain ownership of a job and delegate only limited parts to others. In such cases you are usually close at hand to supervise, advise, and train where necessary. These tasks are lower level activities, like filing, running errands, and, in the home, cleaning and fixing dinner.

• Responsibility. At other times it is appropriate to delegate responsibility or ownership to someone else and supervise at a distance. These are higher level, decision-making responsibilities, such as doing a business project or organizing a closet.

Obviously, delegated authority carries more weight of responsibility than delegated tasks. If a mom delegates the task of setting the table to one of her children she has trained to do the job, it is not unusual for the mom to retain ownership of the outcome. That is, if the table is not set by the time the food is hot and ready, she feels compelled to quickly do it herself, to get another child to do it, or to scurry around to find the uncooperative child, grousing as she does so. The mom takes ultimate ownership of the job and the child knows it.

However, Mom may take another approach. She may give the job to a child as his or her responsibility and make it clear that the child has ownership and that she has no intention of jumping in and taking back the job if it is not done.

Time Management Choice #5

Delegate, delegate, delegate.

One mom made it plain to her tardy child that the responsibility for setting the table was totally his by gathering the family around an unset table when dinner was ready and beginning slowly to plop mashed potatoes on the bare tabletop. The other wide-eyed kids started yelling for the tardy child to do his job—quickly!

Mom was making a point not only to that child but to the others as well. Setting the table was not a job the child was doing for Mom. Setting the table was his job and he owned it. If for some reason he could not do it, it was his responsibility to get somebody else to do it. He had been delegated the authority that goes along with ownership of a responsibility.

Another illustration is that of a sports team. The third baseman is not doing the job of covering third base for the manager because the manager is too busy, too tired, or too unskilled to do it for himself. The third baseman has been delegated by the manager to own that position. How well he does it is his responsibility. The manager evaluates his performance and acts accordingly but he does not run out to third base to take up the slack.

When you take the time and energy to train others to do jobs they can do in your place, you multiply yourself, your accomplishments, and your contributions. You expand your effectiveness even further when you are able to hand over authority for a job you would like to see done but don’t have either the time or the knowledge to do. You honor the person to whom you delegate by your confidence. In short, you build a team to “play” in the area in which you are working. If you have done your job well, together you will win.

The assumption is that, if you recognize the need to delegate, all you need to do is learn how. Then you will be on the road to successful delegation. Experience shows, however, this is not the case. There are two reasons managers in business and parents in the home find it hard to pass responsibility to others.

1. Perfectionist tendencies. Some successful managers hesitate to let go of jobs for fear they won’t be done properly. When the bottom line is affected by how well a job is done, anxiety makes these managers reluctant to turn over the reins to someone else rather than keep doing it themselves. In short, they lack the confidence that anyone else can do the job as well as they can. In addition, they reason, it will take too much time to train someone else to do the job. They believe it is easier not to delegate. Many moms do not delegate because they want it “done right.” They like being needed and find it easier to just do it themselves than to train their children.

2. Personal concerns. When groups from business or government talk openly about the problems of delegation, difficult personal issues that usually run under the radar in the office emerge. Often these people express the fear that those to whom they delegate will take advantage of the situation or will use information to gain leverage over them. They fear they will lose the project or they fear someone will sabotage the project to make them look bad. They may even fear job loss if someone else takes all the credit. Unprofessional behaviors that they have seen in action lurk in the background of their minds, making them hesitant to delegate. In this case, they lack confidence in the integrity of those on their team. Parents who derive their self-esteem from the contributions they make to the home may be reluctant to give these up to someone else.

Soft skills are personal characteristics, such as friendliness, social graces, a desire to serve. Many find it difficult to delegate these characteristics.

Lynette, a fashion consultant, always looks like she is going to a fashion photo shoot. Clients who follow her advice on improving their image get more promotions, compliments, and dates. They develop a better self-image, and their wardrobes become streamlined. In short, Lynette does an excellent job.

Her huge client base consults regularly with her about small and large decisions concerning their clothing choices and other appearance-related questions. She could easily grow her business if she trained and used other image consultants or if she formed a business liaison with other consultants in her area. But being a perfectionist, she does not want to lose control of any aspect of her business. Her main fear is that her trainees would not have the personal skills that are her strong point.

Lynette is not alone. Like many successful entrepreneurs, she has had no experience with sharing the load of the successful business she has created. She is an excellent consultant, but is she a good manager? From day one, Lynette has done all of the hands-on work herself. Deep down, she may fear that if she trains someone to do her job, that person may learn all of her tricks and become competition. So she procrastinates making a decision to expand, works hard to cover all the bases, and stunts the growth of her company.

If Lynette could break through her reluctance to delegate, she might be surprised at the results she could accomplish.

Roy’s operation of his architectural firm has always been one of shared team responsibility right from the beginning of a project. Before he offers a deadline for completion of the architectural plans, he asks each team player how much time their aspect of the project will take. Using their responses as a guideline, he writes his proposal. It is a matter of personal pride and professional integrity for Roy to meet his deadlines. His business is known for this.

Somehow Clement, a new associate, was not keeping up with the timetable to which he had committed. What’s more, he was leaving work at five o’clock as usual. “We can get an extension,” was his solution. This had never been done in Roy’s firm, and Roy ended up doing the work himself to get it in on time. Shortly thereafter, Clement had plenty of time on his hands.

The example of Clement shows that delegation does not always work out. Assuming that Clement was qualified to do the job, the breakdown could have occurred in any of five places. In any case, the final authority rests with the person at the top who needs to be sure all five areas are adequately covered.

2. Did he give clear enough instructions? Giving too many details becomes over-management; giving too few is careless management. The key lies in conversation that draws out the plans and understanding of the person to whom the job is delegated to see if he or she is clear on what needs to be done and whether additional training or supervision is needed.

Perhaps the corporate personality of punctuality was not spotlighted for Clement when he was hired. Or perhaps he was not prepared for some aspects of the job and had to do the work over again, thereby getting behind in his schedule. Maybe if Clement had reported to Roy each Friday, he would have kept on track. It could be that Clement did not realize that his part in the project was such an important aspect of the whole and that other parts waited for the completion of his part. Clearly Clement did not buy into the corporate standards of always getting projects in on time.

This experience proved to be a lesson for Roy. On subsequent projects he made sure that he managed his team members more carefully.

Both business and home management can benefit from using the team model as a guide. In baseball, for instance, the manager needs to make sure the team has the proper equipment, the field is ready for play, and the players know how to play their positions.

At home Mom (or Dad) has the responsibility to train the children early on to do jobs, such as making their beds, cleaning their rooms, and doing their own laundry. In addition to the jobs that relate to their own territory, they need to pitch in with general household tasks like vacuuming, dusting, preparing meals, and cleanup after meals.

Parents delegate for two reasons: they need help in doing all of the household activities, and the children need training for the responsibilities of adulthood. Alert parents keep an eye on the children to determine when they are ready for training. At first, they teach them to do a task by doing it with them and, as time goes by, supervising their actions. Eventually the children do it alone with only occasional supervision to make sure they are not slipping into bad habits.

In the interest of time management, parents should be shifting the responsibilities a little at a time to their children. It is not uncommon for parents to choose to do all or most of the work themselves rather than struggle with resistant children or the effort of training. In the end, this causes problems for both children and parents. Parents do more than they should, and the children are not trained in necessary life skills.

A well-trained child in middle teen years should be able to take over the full responsibility for the whole house for a short time so that if Mom or Dad is away for a week, the household can run just as though he or she were there.

Although Fiona had a busy life with seven children, she did not have a time problem. She expected everybody to do an age-appropriate job each day. She posted the jobs on the refrigerator on a large piece of paper decorated for the season or holiday. Her rule was that only those who had done their jobs could come to the dinner table. Slackers had to do the job before they could join the family.

Because she believed only those who work should get pay, she never gave allowances. Instead she created a money system from altered Monopoly money on which she wrote a job, an age range, and payment. Anyone who wanted money could do the job, have it checked for quality, and receive pay. In that way, extra household jobs could be done.

Your goal is to make your children independent—for both your sake and theirs. Save your time and energy by making it easy for your young trainees to take over activities you are now doing. Here are some suggestions:

• If their beds fit against the wall, pin (with safety pins) the sheets on the wall side of the mattress so the children need to straighten only the outer side.

• If your shower has one handle for regulating tempera-ture, put a waterproof sticker or dot of some kind where the point should aim for the correct temperature. Then the child can bathe independent of your help.

• Lower the bar in your child’s closet so he or she can reach it to hang up clothes. Or buy a commercially made attachment to the bar or make your own with a rope and PVC pipe.

• Get rid of deep toy boxes that lure toys into oblivion. Instead, buy shelves or wire drawers so children can access and return toys easily.

• Draw place setting positions on place mats to show where plates, glasses, and utensils go while the children are learning to set the table.

• At eight years of age, begin training children to do their own laundry (hint: hide bleach during this time).

Whether at home or work, someone who is used to wearing the workman’s hat must move up to wear the management hat if he or she is to ever solve the problem of having too much for one person to do effectively. Making that switch usually comes slowly. But it should come steadily until the delegator has learned the delegating skills well.

4. Clarify responsibility and authority so they will know when to check with you and when to work on their own.

Along with learning the delegating skills of this chapter, we need to learn how to handle an area of our lives that can foul up any management plan—interruptions. This is the subject of the next chapter.

Are you a good delegator? To help you decide, answer yes, maybe, or no to the questions below.

3. Are you confident enough about your own position not to fear competition from the one you are training?

4. Do you have good people skills so you can maintain a positive approach among those to whom you delegate?

5. Are you able to hand over the reins for part of a job to another person under your supervision?

7. Are you able to analyze how the job is organized well enough to know which pieces can be given to someone else?

10. Do you know what to do when the delegation isn’t working and are you willing to do it?

• Consider whether you need to receive more training in those areas where you answered no. Read management articles and books or attend seminars on the subject.

4. Check in from time to time with the person to whom you delegated a job. Give help and answer questions if necessary.

7. Pitch in if necessary to train further or bring in more help if the job is technical.

8. Praise and thank those who do a good job. If possible, give a bonus or reward.

True or false?

1. I am seldom troubled by interruptions.

2. I have a good system for controlling interruptions.

3. My work and family know my time needs and respect them.

If you answered false to any of these, it means you can benefit from revisiting the problem and finding solutions.

When you solve some of the interruption problems, prepare for a big “Hooray!” Keep reading.