by Diana Southall | Dec 3, 2014 | coaching, performance
According to Toronto productivity consultant Mark Ellwood, managers spend 20% of their time on administrative and paperwork tasks that by definition do not advance business goals.
Some of these tasks are essential to your business success (for example, meeting with key customers or coaching performance). The rest are possible items that could be better completed by someone else.
An essential part of an effective People Plan is the Right Person doing the Right Things. And this includes YOU.
Are you spending your time on the Right Things? What could you accomplish for your organization if you “had more time?”
Here are the typical excuses we make NOT to delegate:
- I am the only person who can do this,
- I can’t trust that she will do it right (or she is not trained to do it),
- last time he didn’t do it right,
- she is too busy,
- I don’t have time to train someone
The solution to all of these is to train someone to do this work, and then let them…
As a business owner or manager, you have knowledge and skills that make certain tasks essential for you to perform for the best interests of the company. Your role is to determine and implement the business strategy and tactical goals through your people.
The majority of your time should ideally be spent on training, managing and motivating your people, and overseeing key action items to achieve company goals (from your short term action plans).
For example, you should be the person who reviews financial statements, budgets, and forecasts. You do NOT need to be the person who creates invoices, enters checks or goes to the bank to deposit checks.
We all have tasks that could be adequately performed by a staff member. Often these are administrative or routine in nature. If you spend 30 minutes analyzing your monthly financial statements by computing ratios or comparing to prior months, this is a task that your accounting person can complete and provide in a report with the monthly income statement.
What to delegate
To determine what tasks you can delegate, I highly recommend a simply time study. For one week, track your time in 15 minute increments. You can do this with a printed time chart (every 15 minutes on the left, one column for each day), a voice recorder, or an online time tracker (such as bill4time.com) or even an I-phone app (such as timewerks).
It takes a bit of effort to remember to log your entries, but if you capture 75% of a week you have great data to analyze. If you can also track your phone calls this is additional information. One memory trick is to set a timer to ring every 15 minutes, and record your tasks since the last entry.
Your delegation action steps
- At the end of one week, calculate the time you spend on various work categories, and highlight those that are not essential for you to do. Also review your outgoing emails and phone calls for patterns.
- Divide your tasks into priority categories (a, b, c) or use the Steven Covey method of categorizing by urgent and important. Items that are not important are candidates for delegation, automation, or even elimination.
Typical items for delegation:
- basic fact finding/ research
- entry and collection of data and routine reports
- basic analysis and problem solving suggestions
- routine communication
- sorting of emails and mail
- tasks that you are not very good at or dislike
- “enrichment” tasks that can give an employee the opportunity to learn and develop
3. Identify to whom to delegate
Once you have identified tasks to delegate, select an appropriate staff member to become responsible. Delegation can provide “stretch goals” to provide job enrichment to employees, so don’t always give items to the most experienced. If you have multiple task sets to delegate, share this among several staff members.
4. Train that person and the “inspect what you expect” until they are meeting expectations and you can be confident in the results without taking the work back.
5. Remember, you will have to invest a bit of time in the short run to reap the long term rewards of off-loading some of your tasks. You will also continue to be responsible to manage the process and review outcomes.
by Diana Southall | Nov 25, 2014 | coaching, culture
Would you want to work with someone who has passion, focus, integrity, and positivity?
Or how about someone with great planning and interpersonal skills?
Of course! (No wait, give me that team mate who is Debbie Downer, always late with her work and tactless…)
As a coach of People, you want to demonstrate both the business skills expected of peers and the leadership traits that build trust and engage a team.
Here is a fun and quick list compiled by a very creative guy, Barry Feldman.
He calls these the “monsters of influence” but I call them essential for a Coach.
Influence pulls your team together, rather than pushing them.
Homework: Want to do your own “self-assessment” for this year– how would you rate yourself on these? (And how would your team rate you?)
Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by Diana Southall | Jun 17, 2014 | action plans, coaching, performance
When we have an employee who seems to be struggling with part of the job, we think back and exclaim “but she was trained!”
Often a person has been “trained” but still does not adequately complete the job duties.
There are multiple reasons “training” doesn’t succeed:
- It was not comprehensive enough- just covering the basics does not convey enough information
- It was given too fast in too short a period of time (everyone learns at a different rate)
- The trainer only demonstrated the skill, and did not have the trainee practice it twice with coaching
- Training did not match the learner’s best learning method (Some people learn better by listening, some via doing it, some by reading)
- The trainer did not have adequate knowledge or verbal skills to impart all informa tion (if someone knows 70% then they train 70% of that and trainee gets 49% of it.
The basic solution is to re-visit the skill or knowledge that needs to be taught, and to systematically review this information.
Seasoned trainers also regularly check to make sure the trainee is absorbing the information, by asking for some sort of demonstration of learning. (“Okay, now I would like you to show me how you would enter a new order.”)
Once you have verified that the person was adequately trained or re-trained, you need to keep the knowledge active. Give the person the opportunity to use it periodically and coach for improvement.
If you don’t see improvement over time then you have your answer “will training help?” – and look for other causes (usually job fit related).
Image Courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
by Diana Southall | May 6, 2014 | coaching, performance
We have all worked with an employee (perhaps you know one now) that does not seem to ever “get” a part of the job, or who continues to struggle with something longer than expected.
For example, you show this person how to create a report three times over three months, but in month 4 she asks for help again. Or he normally can handle the tasks you delegate, but every once in a while he seems flustered and avoids finishing those that require advanced planning.
What could be the cause? I don’t know! Part of people coaching is diagnostic—looking at trends and asking questions to uncover the reason behind a performance gap. And that is what you have to do to answer the question “Will training help?”
Three areas where training is less effective:
- an underlying attitude issue (lack of commitment to job or company)
- if someone’s personal values / beliefs don’t match organization values
- lack of job fit (due to personality traits or competency that don’t match up)
If you uncover that the “root cause” of the performance gap is ability, then you have a situation where training can improve performance.
Image Courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
by Diana Southall | Apr 5, 2014 | coaching, performance
Determining the cause of a performance issue can be like being a detective– here is a list of 10 major reasons employees “don’t do the job” with possible solutions.
Source: Expectations
1. They don’t know what to do
2. They think they are doing it
Solution: I read many job descriptions—hundreds per year from dozens of organizations—rarely do they clarify for me the specific job activities and key results areas, much less how the job will be measured. It is difficult to hold someone accountable to results when the manager has not made it crystal clear what those results should be and what s/he has to do to get those results. Otherwise employees just take their best guess and do what seems to be the most urgent.
3. They think something else is more important
Solution: A great survey report showed that employees only agree with managers on 1 out of 3 priorities! Frequent coaching and follow up makes sure that what a person is working on is the highest priority for the job and department. An employee does the best she can reading the tea leaves to guess what her manager thinks is priority. Don’t make them guess… also, remember employees often don’t have the broader view or much information outside of their own activities (and yes, the more they do the better decisions they will make.)
Source: Training
4. They don’t know how to do it
Solution: Work with employee to identify skill or competency to enhance with training, create a training plan with a timeline and hold employee accountable to stick to the plan (even if it means reminding her manager to schedule the time or resources).
5. They are uncomfortable doing it
Solution: Sometimes a little training can increase someone’s confidence and they become “comfortable” with the task and then perform it regularly. More likely this is a symptom of job fit—someone’s personality traits or competencies are not aligned with those required to excel in the job. A classic example is “asking for the sale”— a person who is cooperative (lower assertive) can be trained for years on sales techniques and given scripts, but he is always uncomfortable closing. For job fit, the remedy is to change the job duties to ones that correspond with the person’s strengths and attributes.
Source: Feedback/ Recognition
6. They can do it but don’t want to
7. They are rewarded for not doing it
8. They are not rewarded when they do it
Solution: This is fundamental psychology. People do what is measured and recognized and rewarded. If they are not rewarded (or worse, “punished”) for doing something, most people stop doing it. Sales people don’t like to do paperwork—but they also don’t want to be reminded that they were late 9 of the last 10 weeks—this is powerful feedback.
Often the signals sent by managers are unintended. Do you reward your poor performers by giving extra work to others that you can depend on? Do you remember to praise and even publicly recognize the team that worked last weekend to finish up a project?
For ideas on how to recognize the Right Things, read blog post “Quick Recognition Template”
Source: Belief
9. They don’t know why they should do it
Solution: Some people will blindly follow rules, but most want to know the “why” behind something that they are asked to do. It they believe a task or process is x (insert label here: low importance, arbitrary, a waste of time, or just plain stupid), no amount of training will effect a change in behavior. You might get begrudging compliance but that is about it. To get commitment, you have to explain the “why” to change the belief. (Until they believe his IS important, worth my time, etc.)
10. They think their way is better.
Solution: Read the solution above… plus this often happens when you ask someone who is good/ comfortable with the “old way” and now you have a “new way.” And in the beginning, the old way is better since an employee is more comfortable and competent in the old way. A big part of culture change and process change is to overcome the belief that the old way is better.
A key personality trait is openness to new experiences and some people are not. They will cling to the things they know how to do. As a manager you will need to support and coach these employees through the pain and fear that comes with change. Recognize that this is more deep seeded than just a training issue, but a consistent personality trait or a cognitive filter (belief) and be patient and supportive, and work through changing the belief, not just behavior.
As a client’s manager once stated, “if we have 100 people then we have 100 different personalities.” It’s your job as a manager to figure out what is the cause and the solution that works for all the unique individuals on your team.
by Diana Southall | Mar 14, 2014 | coaching, job fit, performance
I have always been an advocate for finding and rewarding a great employee. As the People consultant who I worked with years ago was fond of saying, “it’s never the wrong time to hire the right person.”
And I have examples from personal experience in my family business and at clients who found that the right person can make a huge impact on the work environment, productivity, sales and ultimately profit.
But I want to share an astounding story related recently by a woman entrepreneur who is in one of my business groups.
For months, she was frustrated with the results of the manager in her production operation.
Her business coach continued to advise her to recruit and select another manager, but as we all know, recruiting and selection is TIME CONSUMING. And you worry that the person you finally hire may not be any better than the person you have. And then you have to spend time training the new person…. And the list goes on, so we stall and don’t go looking for the Ideal.
At some point she decided that maybe she would at least look for another candidate, so created a profile of the ideal candidate (Lesson 1– do this before recruiting so that you are attracting the Ideal Candidate).
Then she made a list of the job performance results she really needed, key skills and competencies of an ideal production manager. She said that when she systematically wrote this out, it was not what she was originally thought she needed! (Lesson 2– by systematic and clear about your Ideal Candidate.)
Then she placed a local advertisement describing the ideal candidate and the very detailed position requirements and results.
Who applied?- an applicant who was working at a similar larger production facility that had just closed. She interviewed this candidate and found out that he had the industry skills and knowledge, but more importantly management and leadership skills. After a thorough selection process, she was confident this candidate had a good probability of being an A player. (Lesson 3– Validate, don’t just take someone’s word for their capabilities after one interview.)
Fast forward one month after he started to this business results:
- the crew increased from 55% productivity (plus overtime to get orders out) to 100% productivity with no overtime
- the process was running so smoothly the backlog of 2 weeks to get orders shipped dropped to 2 days
- because she was able to contact customers (instead of putting out fires in the production and shipping area) she sold 64% more sales that month!
And how much more did she pay this new manager? The same as the prior one. Even if he wanted 15% more base pay —would he have been worth it? (Did I mention 64% more sales?)
Lesson 4– So you say you don’t have time to find an A player, and you can’t afford one? What would 10% more productivity or sales do for your profit this year?
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
