Delegate
Mark enjoyed his new promotion. He was really pleased as he felt he had earned it. He had been in his software development job for years, and was technically proficient. He knew the culture of the organization, and had a good rapport with his manager, Andrew.
He enjoyed his individual contributor work, and was good at it, but Andrew was concerned that Mark did not always know the status of projects his group members were working on. Andrew was right. It’s just that Mark was working on a ton of complicated projects. He didn’t have the details of the other projects, and hadn’t cultivated the internal customers attached to the projects. He spent more time on his own projects.
Manager’s Work
The biggest challenge on being promoted is regarding the #management of others as real work. At every level of #promotion, managers often tend to regard managing others in the category of “when I get to it.” When I finish my work, Mark thought, I’ll interview, orient, monitor, manage, motivate, update, communicate, and develop the skills of others. But my real work is my individual project responsibility.
There are two dimensions of this challenge. One is to give up the projects that can be done well by others on the team, even if Mark enjoys some of them. If he keeps all the projects he has and doesn’t have time to #manage, he will be a good individual contributor and a bad manager.
The other dimension is helping staff with their own work. If Mark makes time to manage, and pay attention to what they are doing, he may be tempted to be too helpful when they reach a difficulty. Instead of encouraging, empowering or teaching, he may pick up the task and finish it himself. There is a lot of satisfaction in troubleshooting successfully, but it fails to develop others.
In this New York Times article, Amit Singh of Google For Work speaks about the #delegation challenges: NYT “I learned the hard way about the importance of coaching people rather than jumping in and doing the work for them. A lot of folks have a tough time with that balance, and I did, too. Instead of giving people advice or coaching them on how to present something, I would go and do it for them.”
Making Time for Management
I recommend recently promoted managers, at every level, whether from manager to director, or director to vice president, make more time for management. Managers need to find time to regard managing others as priority work. Mark has to find his own comfort zone, but here are few techniques to experiment with:
- Block out an hour and-a-half in his calendar every day for management time
- Increase that time each week to transition out of old projects and delegate them to others, leaving time to mentor
- Schedule weekly one-on-one meetings with each person. These can be 10 minutes or 1 hour. Frequent contact can be very motivating for reconciling priority conflicts, answering questions and advancing stalled projects.
- Periodically dedicate one of those meetings to a more developmental conversation, to learn from staff what is really engaging for them, when they are enlivened, what they want to learn, and where they feel really confident.
- Think. Pause the doing and take time to reflect on what is going well and what needs improvement.
- Schedule team meetings to foster informal relationships, brainstorming and learning from each other
Delegating takes time but it’s one of the few activities that also creates time. Good delegators have a broader span of influence and a greater chance to create results, not to mention, happier staff.
Janet Britcher, MBA is President of Transformation Management, LLC and a Certified Executive Coach for leaders and managers. She has extensive experience as a leader and, prior to starting her own company in 2002, as head of Human Resources. Since 2002, she has provided one-on-one executive coaching, especially for managers destined for promotion, and offers leadership workshops to transform leadership effectiveness.
Also see my last post, Keeping Cool During Office Drama