The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - The Secret of Successful Delegation

In his book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" Stephen Covey talks about the proper way to delegate to other persons. If you do well delegation, you will get a huge increase in your ability to provide. If you take the wrong approach, you'll find yourself fighting the fires created by other people. Undermine the foundations of the delegation good at your own risk!

The most powerful way to leverage your time is through delegation. As an individual you have only 24 hours in any day to create the desired results. By delegating responsibility for the activities to other people, you can increase the number of hours to check in every day.

Delegation, in particular for people who are learning to manage others is often one of the hardest things to do right. If badly managed, rather than creating more time you will end up spending more time in resolving the crisis created by other people or their time ineffectively and inefficiently.

Stephen Covey identifies two main styles of delegation, which will add a third. In today's sophisticated business environment, only one of these styles will produce the result you want to multiply your effectiveness.

"Gofer delegation"

In this style of delegation will give the person detailed instructions for each task to be carried out even when and how to do homework. You end up telling them to "go for it, go do that ..." hence the name! You've probably met someone like this - the micro manager who wants to know everything you're doing and control every aspect of your work.

This style of delegating work to a certain point. The micro manager can manage several people, each of which may be performing specific tasks, which if properly coordinated can lead to a result larger than a single person on their own.

However there are several limitations to this approach. The micro-manager can manage only what he can control during the space of one working day. His teams have little room to contribute their ideas and creative input. If properly managed these inputs may provide a result of much greater.

This style is often the first people to adopt the delegation as they start supervising others. This is a simple extension of their approach to managing themselves.

Delegation by Abdication

I think the name tells you that this is not a good approach. This is often adopted by people who lack confidence in themselves, who have had a bad experience with a micro-manager, or do not have a clear plan for what you want.

It is often mistaken for true management of the delegation which will be discussed below, but differs in several critical ways.

In this style the manager says his team or not she wants to do and then lets them go on with it. It seems ok? Well, there are a lot of potential problems:

Team members may not know what to do and may end up doing their thing.

Unless the people who are delegates are accustomed to working in teams with each other for a long period of time, there is little chance that the activities will be coordinated and produce consistent results.

There are no expectations of results so that you do not know where they are going. They'll get somewhere sometime, but there is no guarantee that produce everything that is useful or that they will do in a reasonable time.

In essence, the delegator has abdicated their responsibility.

Delegation by Stewardship

Delegation by Stewardship, as called for in the "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" takes the best of the two methods that I have read and correct their weaknesses. Not dictate the methods - the ones who are left to the person, but focuses on achieving specific results.

This process begins with a clear vision of what must be achieved at the end of the process. This can be a goal of the project or can be a clear set of parameters that describe the release of a particular task.

The manager shares the vision with the person about to do the job and jointly develop a plan and identify gaps in knowledge people. If the person doing the work does not have much experience, the manager may need to do a lot of this on their behalf.

The next step is to set the ground rules for work - when it should be done, how you want to progress to report, the important things that should be avoided, the problems that can be anticipated, what resources are available ...

Finally, the person should be given clear standards of performance to be achieved and the consequences of good and bad performance must be explained.

As the person who performs the work, encourage them to report on progress and problems and also to ask for help wherever they need it. However, it will give them the latitude to accomplish the task within the guidelines, provided they meet the agreed objectives.

Stephen Covey says the method of management delegated by the "7 Habits of Highly Effective People". This method allows team members to achieve outstanding results at the same time ensuring that they remain focused on the big picture. It allows you to maximize the leverage that you can get to be delegated to other persons....