So you’ve hired a manager to manage your employees? Congratulations, and deepest sympathies.
Congratulations because this must mean that business is booming. And sympathies, because now you are a manager of your manager, and this might not be a role you envisioned for yourself when you set up your shop, your practice, your restaurant. The very good news is that there is a proven way to add employees and managers who are all working in alignment – without your hands-on involvement!
If you are like most small business owners, you probably started on your own as a solopreneur, handling every single aspect of the business: customer relations, marketing, advertising, billing, bookkeeping, collections, shopping, maintenance, web design, licensing, tech support, cleaning, and, oh yes, actually providing your product or service to customers.
Then at some point you hired your first employee. You read books and websites and blog posts about how to grow, and they all said that you should delegate or outsource all the stuff you are not good at or that you don’t enjoy so that you can focus on your core work. This is sound advice. And it might have worked fine for a while; it was great to have another person to help manage the workload, and to do all that necessary stuff that does not really feed your soul.
As business continued to grow, you added a few more employees, and then a few more. You found yourself spending all your time training, coaching and helping your employees, answering their questions, backing them up when they didn’t come to work, listening sympathetically to their personal problems (because you are a decent human being), and replacing them when they moved on. In other words, you became a manager.
When you realized you were no longer doing the thing you love to do, and your vision for the business had become a little blurry, you promoted one of your employees to be the manager.
This freed up your time. Good move. As long as it doesn’t kill your business.
A manager who is thrown into the trenches is in a no-win situation. If he or she takes the initiative to make decisions and instruct the employees without any guidance from you, he or she is likely to point those employees in the wrong direction, resulting in embarrassing or costly mistakes. If, on the other hand, your manager comes to you for guidance before making any moves, the time you hoped to free up vanishes.
So, how do you delegate work to your manager without getting into the details, and with the confidence that it will be done the way you want it done?
Well, first you have to dissuade yourself from the notion that “the way you want it done” is the only way to do it.
Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the classic book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” explains the two basic styles of delegating. He calls the first style “gopher delegating” which means that you tell your manager to “go for this, go for that, do this, do that and tell me when it’s done.” Basically, you become a gopher wrangler.
When you are a gopher wrangler, you define the method, the materials, and the means by which the work gets done. It’s not much different than before, when you were managing all the employees by yourself, but now you just tell one person – your manager – and hope that your manager translates your instructions to your employees correctly so that you get the results you want.
The better way – because it more effectively leads to the results you want – is to learn what Covey calls “stewardship delegation.” As he says in “The 7 Habits…”
This approach involves an entirely new paradigm of delegation. In effect, it changes the nature of the relationship: the steward becomes his own boss, governed by a conscience that contains the commitment to agreed upon desired results. But it also releases his creative energies toward doing whatever is necessary in harmony with correct principles to achieve those desired results.
The example of stewardship delegation that Covey gives is the story of how he delegated the household task of maintaining the lawn to his young son. Instead of telling his son how to mow, when to water, and when to walk around the yard picking up debris, he distilled his vision of a successful outcome into a simple phrase: Clean and Green. He gave his son guidelines (“you’re free to do it any way you want, except paint it”), he provided the resources ( a mower, an offer to answer questions), a plan for accountability (a walk around the yard) and the consequences for meeting or not meeting the desired result of Clean and Green.
Of course, managing a business is much more complex than caring for a lawn. If you are starting to think about a business equivalent of Clean and Green, you might be running into some mental hurdles already. One common mistake is to define a desired outcome as something too vague, like “revenue growth,” or “strong social media presence.” But if you add some numbers, these become outcomes that everyone can understand: “grow revenue by 15% in the next twelve months,” or “increase our followers to 5000 by the end of the year.”
Besides being specific, your desired outcome also needs to be directly actionable. For instance, although “satisfied customers” sounds like a good outcome, a better plan is is to think about how you can measure and control that more directly. For instance, you might define the desired outcome as “we have repeat sales for 95% of our customers every year.”
If you are ready to give up gopher wrangling and move towards stewardship delegation, your responsibility is to define a vision for desired outcomes in each area of your business, then work with your manager to agree on the guidelines, resources, accountability standards, and consequences, both good and bad.
Defining a vision and clarifying its boundaries is a tremendous amount of upfront work, so start with something small that you, your manager, and your employees can all buy into. Ideally, this effort will demonstrate a successful process and outcome. As with any skill, learning stewardship delegation takes time, and you and your team are bound to make some mistakes. You may even find yourself slipping back into gopher wrangling mode. But over time, embracing stewardship delegation will give you the desired result you want: a successful business that runs well without running you into the ground.