“The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%.”
—ANDREW CARNEGIE
IF YOU’RE LIKE MANY BOSSES that we’ve worked with, you are frustrated by a lack of time to do your job well. In this chapter we will teach you the ultimate time management tool, Delegate and Elevate™, to help you clarify and identify the activities that you must delegate to others in order to free up your time capacity to be a great boss.
Completing the Delegate and Elevate exercise helps you discover whether you truly want to do boss-related activities focused on leading and managing people. It also shows you how to look at the activities you find yourself doing over the course of a week or month. Further, it explores how much you enjoy them and your competence in doing them. This will help you “discover” those activities that energize you and those you should delegate to others. Remember, to become a great boss, you need enough time. This tool will put your true gifts in perspective so you can focus your energy and time on your strengths. After all, no one has the ability or time to do everything, and the sooner you delegate, the better your department will run.
The Delegate and Elevate exercise is a five-step process that should not be hurried. We ask you to be thorough with each step. They are as follows:
Step 1
List all of the business-related activities that you do during the course of a day, week, and month. Write them down in a journal or a notebook. This list may take several hours to compile over a period of a week or longer, so do not rush it. Be patient and detailed.
Step 2
After completing your list of business-related activities, compare it to the sample of boss-related activities provided on page 25 in Diagram 1. Add any activities that you overlooked to your list. Please note that in the third column of Diagram 1, we have listed some boss-related activities that are specific to dealing with direct reports.
Step 3
When you’re satisfied that you have a complete list of all your activities, turn to Diagram 2 and place each activity into one of the four quadrants. Please be completely honest with yourself as you add them to the appropriate quadrant.
Step 4
In the four quadrants, examine where you placed the activities that Diagram 1 indicates are boss related and specific to dealing with direct reports. (To make this easier, mark them with a highlighter.) A minimum of 80 percent of those activities from the boss-related list in the third column of Diagram 1 should be in the top two quadrants, along with most of the items in the first and second columns.
If most of them are in the top two quadrants, you probably have what it takes (the capacity) to be a great boss. If not, you may find more satisfaction and fulfillment in applying your expertise and technical skill in a role that doesn’t require you to lead and manage others.
Step 5
If you cannot accomplish all of the business activities you listed in the time you have, then you have a time-capacity issue. You need to “delegate and elevate” the activities in the bottom two quadrants that are occupying too much of your time. We will address exactly how to do this in the next few pages.
Diagram 1
Diagram 2
DELEGATE AND ELEVATE™ QUADRANTS
Quadrant 1 – “Love/Great” activities are those that you’ve mastered, that you love doing, that give you energy and a sense of fulfillment.
Quadrant 2 – “Like/Good” activities are those that you can do with minimal effort and that give you enjoyment and satisfaction.
Quadrant 3 – “Don’t Like/Good” activities are those that you are good at doing—you have learned to do them well through repetition and necessity—but that don’t give you real satisfaction or a sense of fulfillment.
Quadrant 4 – “Don’t Like/Not Good” activities are most likely outside your area of expertise and leave you feeling inadequate and frustrated.
We hope that this exercise has been an eye-opener for you, allowing you to reflect on activities that you do on a regular basis, probably with little thought as to why you do them or how much you really enjoy doing them. You have fallen into a groove and it has become a routine. That’s natural. However, if you’re not careful, a routine can become a rut.
Let’s compare the bolded and non-bolded business-related activities in Diagram 1. If you are a person who loves and is great at doing the bolded items (people-related skills) but haven’t mastered the non-bolded items (technical skills), you may be a great people person. Those skills alone, however, are not enough to make you a great boss. Conversely, if you are someone who loves and is great at doing the non-bolded items (technical skills) but dreads doing the ones in bold (people-related skills), you may be technically competent and a great manager of things—just not people. Technical skills alone won’t make you a great boss, either.
Take a close look at the top two quadrants. Where did you place the “boss-related activities” (the ones in bold from Diagram 1 or the ones you highlighted) that are specific to dealing with direct reports? Are most of those activities in the top two quadrants? We hope that they are. If not, take heart. Great bosses aren’t born; they develop. You may have placed activities that are specific to dealing with direct reports in the bottom two quadrants because you have failed at doing them well in the past. The reasons for why you failed may be unrelated to your capacity to be a great boss. Like you, many bosses find themselves consumed by the activities that they find themselves doing each day. If you’re willing to develop the skills to become a great boss and delegate the rest, there’s hope. If not, don’t kid yourself. You’ll struggle to fulfill the role of a great boss and you’ll continue to frustrate yourself and those you’re trying to lead. Life is too short to be doing things that you don’t get, want, or have the capacity to do.
You don’t always have the luxury of delegating all the things that you do. However, to leverage your emotional, intellectual, physical, and time capacity to do the job, you must develop a plan to delegate items in the bottom two quadrants. You can’t be great at everything, and you’ll never have the time to become a great boss if you don’t let go of the things that bog you down. Despite working long hours, many bosses complain that they still don’t have enough time to get everything done. That reminds us of a quip attributed to Robert Frost: “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.” As a bonus, when you spend most of your time doing activities that you placed in the top two quadrants—the activities that you love to do and are great at doing—more than likely time seems to fly.
Time is the most precious resource great bosses have. You should be spending yours on the most important matters in your department. If you’re running off to mail a package or to pick up office supplies, you’re wasting precious time. Delegate it! There are only twenty-four hours in a day, so use them wisely.
Now, think of Diagram 3 below as your seat in the organization and as an illustration of your “time capacity” for that seat. Then think of the roles that you must fulfill as a boss. Please know that you determine your time capacity—the hours to effectively do the job. For some, it’s forty hours per week. For others it may be sixty. You decide. Whatever you choose—that’s your time capacity. People who work at 120 percent of their time capacity are bound for disaster. You won’t be an effective boss with a high level of job satisfaction and fulfillment if you’re continually operating beyond your time capacity. You’ll burn out or suffer serious health issues.
Diagram 3
If you decide that fifty hours per week is your magic number, then that is your 100 percent. If you then take sixty hours per week to get the job done, you are working at 120 percent capacity. It is time for you to delegate 20 percent (ten hours) of what you are doing to get back to 100 percent. The activities you should delegate should come from the bottom two quadrants, freeing you up to spend time in the top two quadrants. Ideally, you should delegate additional activities to get down to 90 percent capacity. This will proactively free up extra capacity to prepare you for growth. At the very least, it will give you extra time to handle the emergencies that inevitably come up every week.
By delegating the activities in the bottom two quadrants, you’re actually doing yourself and your team a big favor. You are elevating yourself to do what you love to do and what you do well. You therefore make yourself more valuable to the organization, not to mention being happier and more energetic.
You are doing your team a favor for several reasons. First, you are freeing up more of your time to spend with them, ensuring they feel more valued. You are giving them more responsibility and more autonomy. You’ll stop being a bottleneck to those that report to you. Best of all, your people may be more competent than you are at doing the things that you’ve delegated to them. For instance, if you are not so great at community relations but it’s important to your company, determine who on your team would enjoy doing it and be good at doing it. Then delegate it to them.
Debra Hutson, a manager for a distribution company in Texas, did just that with her entire department. She called it “Help Debra Day.” After sharing her Delegate and Elevate self-assessment with her team, she discovered that many activities that she had placed in the bottom two quadrants were actually activities that a few people on her team loved to do. She delegated those activities and improved both her time capacity and her department’s effectiveness.
Oftentimes, bosses resort to the familiar when they’re under stress. “If I do it, I know the thing will get done right” goes that line of thinking. They find themselves doing what they’ve hired others to do. This frustrates some of their direct reports while enabling others to avoid accountability. This behavior has many negative consequences, not the least of which is lost productivity and the inability to focus on the activities that are really the best use of their time.
We recognize that delegating is simple in theory but not easy in practice. Plus, you may be resistant to letting go. Here’s a list of the most common reasons bosses give for not delegating:
1. Being good at these activities got me promoted in the first place.
2. I have no one to delegate to.
3. It takes too much time for me to train someone.
4. I find that it’s faster and easier to do it myself.
5. I wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.
6. No one can do it as well as me.
7. It’s too complicated to explain it to them.
8. I spend too much time fixing their mistakes.
We categorize these reasons as the “personal head trash” that prevents people from becoming great bosses.
By delegating and elevating, you will build extensions of yourself that will enable you and your organization to continue to grow and develop. By not delegating activities to others, you will remain stuck.
Reflected one boss, “When I think of my own experience, I can see I’ve struggled to delegate things because I wasn’t separating activities based on both my ability and desire to do them.”
With that said, here is the painful truth. While this book will help you get past a lot of the personal head trash, you must get past it or you are destined to stagnate or find yourself replaced by a great boss.
Employees need to know that you trust them to do the work that you’ve delegated to them. Are you willing to let go of many of the activities that you’ve become good at doing but that are not the best use of your time?
Chris Beltowski of imageOne shared, “Applying the concept of delegating and elevating took me to a whole new level as a leader. It was an eye-opener that showed me how I could use my time better and grow as a leader. I was getting bogged down in everything and did not allow myself or my team to grow.”
Great bosses appreciate that the return on investing time in their people is exponential to the results that it reaps. Leading and managing people is the number one role for a boss. You can’t escape that fact. The more direct reports you have and the more diverse their roles, the more time a boss must devote to leading and managing. So look at the activities that you placed in the four quadrants and ask yourself, “Do I really have the emotional, intellectual, physical, and time capacity to be a great boss?”
Assuming that you’ve answered yes, you’re ready to take another step towards becoming a great boss.
