THE EDCON GROUP
- LEADERSHIP BLOG -
By Bill Sharp
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Some can’t handle big assignments
In our trek to find ways for your staff to accept some delegated responsibilities, it’s important to admit what you already know. There are differences among various people. Some are the “set it and forget” type. Others are not as skilled or willing to put forth extra (or any) effort.
The chart above shows what would happen if every member of your staff were evaluated on two factors: (1) How quickly they learn, (2) How likely they are to “stick with it.”
Those who are both bright and dependable (upper right) we will call a STAR. Tell them once…and walk away. They not only get it done quickly but, in many cases, better than you might have done it. The problem leaders have is that when a STAR finishes everything early, the reward is often…more work. They are asked to help others who didn’t get their work done.
In the lower right are WORK HORSE people…not the mental equal of a STAR…but completely trustworthy. They love their work, show up every day, on time and take on tough tasks.
At the top right are those who have good minds but don’t like to work…a PROBLEM CHILD. They often become “con artists.” They know how to get help from others (or you) to complete tasks they should do themselves. You see this when they say, “I didn’t quite get it done, but I will work on it first thing tomorrow. You want the task completed today so you send a STAR and/or WORK HORSE to help…or you help. Either way, the PROBLEM CHILD has again found a way to get someone else to do the work.
Finally, in the lower left are those who not only don’t contribute, they drag the team down. If you inherited a staff, you might be wondering, “Who hired this person?” The truth: if he or she were not the child of a very important/powerful person, s/he wouldn’t be here.
So when delegating, a STAR is always a safe bet. But, get out of the way. Don’t micro-manage.
Your WORK HORSE will need more instruction, but will stay with the task until it is correctly done.
The PROBLEM CHILD must get a clear picture that help is not coming. Stay with it until it’s finished.
Encourage your FOCUS CHALLENGED person to look for work elsewhere. You may be thinking, “I’ll be a person short.” Honestly, if you have people like this on your staff, you’ve been a person short for quite some time.
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What not to Delegate
1. Things some people can’t handle. It doesn’t make any sense to transfer a major chunk of your important responsibilities to someone who is relatively new and inexperienced.
We will discuss more in a coming article, but there are two equally important factors when deciding whether to delegate something to a person on your staff: (1) Does the person have the skills to do the job?, (2) Do you have confidence the person can do the job?
Staff members rise to your level of expectation. If they sense you don’t have confidence in them, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
2. Something that will not have a large enough line of authority for the delegatee to pull off the job. If one must constantly run to you for authorization, you’ll end up doing the job yourself.
Again, more will be written about this later. You can’t simply can’t give staff members a line of authority to spend money and use company resources that could create problems if poor decisions are made. On the other hand, if they can’t independently acquire necessary materials, you’ll spend valuable time approving minor requests.
3. Things that the structure of the organization cannot permit. In a situation where owners have many homes, it creates problems to tell administrators they can order anything (supplies) they want if someone else is assigned to coordinating inventory and purchasing centrally.
It will create chaos to assign one person to coordinate and order supplies when facility administrators are told they can do whatever they want about ordering.
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Things to delegate
1. Things others do better than you. When you have talented people who provide excellent care, it just makes sense to stay out of that area of responsibility as much as possible.
Your skills at day-to-day tasks you did so well before you were promoted tend to deteriorate as you spend more time on leadership matters. If you have staff who do the job faster or more effectively than you, step back.
2. Jobs you find boring and/or repetitious. Leaders can become stagnate if their days are filled with an endless series of repetitious activities. Over days and weeks, the work can become “routine.” You need to look at new things and changes that can be made to move the organization forward. To do that, you should consider taking some of the habitual activities out of your daily cycle. There is never time enough to do the things you want and need to do when your days are loaded with inconsequential activities.
3. Things you don’t like to do. Some managers dislike handling certain parts of necessary business activities. One administrator personally enjoyed the meeting people part of public relations. She disliked dealing with advertising and promotion. As it turns out, her assistant thoroughly enjoyed advertising and promotion. The two worked together beautifully over the years when she turned over all of the advertising and promotional functions to her assistant.
There are probably things you do that you don’t like. Eliminating these from your daily activities makes your day much more enjoyable and your attitude more positive. Probably, somebody on your staff right now would enjoy the challenge of doing a job you hate.
4. Off-load low priority decisions. If your day is an endless string of people coming to ask for your authorization on inconsequential matters, get rid of that level of decision making. Give it to someone else or give staff a larger Area of Freedom so they can quickly and efficiently handle questions or problems on their own. Not only will this free time for you, but it will substantially increase your staff’s sense of ownership of their jobs.
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Why would someone be willing to do this?
Remember a TV commercial for a healthy breakfast cereal? Three little boys, a cereal that didn’t look familiar and the older ones were not willing to taste it. They looked at each other, said, “Give it to Mikey” and pushed bowl to the youngest…and he like it.
Most leaders have some tasks that must be done, but they don’t like doing them. Let’s use the example of some routine report that must be completed and submitted on regular basis. Early in the week it is sitting right at the front center of your desk. As the week progresses, it moves to various corners of the desk. It gets buried under other paperwork. It talks to you, “I need to be in the out basket.” Then, grudgingly, with only minutes to spare, you knuckle down and get it done…and the process immediately begins again.
Often, the assumption is, “Because I hate doing the report, everyone hates it.” You think about giving it to Mikey (someone on your staff), but that seems an underhanded, snake-in-grass thing to do. After all, that person won’t want to do it. Right? Not necessarily.
What if your Mikey performs a series of tasks every day that offer little or no variety to make the days feel different? Further, what if Mikey is fast enough with his or her work that there is a little spare time before the shift ends? Most importantly, what if Mikey hungers for a chance do something that is noticed and appreciated?
Hopefully, we won’t repeat the two things your employees want so often that you get tired of reading it, but achievement and recognition can cause staff members to not only accept but enjoy some of the tasks you might give them.
During the years I supervised others, I found many times when various members of my staff not only wanted a new assignment, but did it better than I would have.
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How am I doing?
As we conclude our four part mini-discussion of things your employees need to know to do the things you want done, we must look at the single most powerful motivational tool leaders have…periodic, spontaneous feedback, in the moment.
According to several well-known and highly respected psychologists, the two most powerful “motivators” are achievement and recognition. The first three articles in this short series have outlined a way for all employees to know if they are achieving. Periodic feedback pulls it all together by providing the element of recognition.
Sadly, so often leaders say things like, “Oh, they know I appreciate them.” Really? Sometimes leaders manage by exception. Staff has 20 things to get done. They finish 17. What do they hear about? The three they didn’t finish.
Men often search the greeting card rack on Mother’s Day and anniversaries for just the right sentiment. There are a dozen variations of “I know I don’t tell you enough that I love you, but…” and one of those is often the one picked. You know you’re loved by a person who doesn’t tell you? Really?
One of top 10 best books on management ever written (in my opinion) is INSEARCH OF EXCELLENCE. There are many suggestions for leaders, but one that stuck with me is MBWA…Management By Wandering Around. The very best managers make it a point to wander around when staff is busy doing their work. As often as they can, they try to “catch someone doing it right”…and they step in to offer an immediate “Thank you” and/or “I appreciate the way you handled that.”
Doesn’t employee of week, month or year take care of the need for recognition? Nope. One person ends up getting congratulated. Periodic, spontaneous, in the moment feedback is something every employee can have…even if some of them are not superstars.
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How good is good?
This is part three of four on the issue of what your employees need to know about their work. We have already discussed two big ones: (1) What do you want me to do? and (2) Why is this important…why do you want me to do these things?
If your staff understands these things, the next question you should answer for them is: “How will I know if I did the task well enough to please you?”
Notice I didn’t base the evaluation on “what would most people think is good.” Your staff doesn’t work for “most people.” They work for you. Your expectations can be very high or rather low, but “how good is good” is directly tied to you.
Were you promoted from a position that you now supervise? If so, chances are good you did your work very well. Was the quality of your work substantially above “standard?” If so, it’s likely that you want those who report to you to do their work as well as you did. Often, that won’t happen. You were an exception. That’s why you were promoted.
Does that mean you should set the standard of “acceptable” low enough that just about anyone could attain it? That wouldn’t be good for the organization or the people for whom you care.
Just about all workers are capable of doing better. However, as the old saying goes, “It’s hard to hit a target you can’t see, and virtually impossible to hit one you don’t have.”
You don’t have to chisel standards in granite. You could have a standard that is “acceptable for now” and then raise it as the group improves.
Find out what you think is “good” by completing this statement for the key tasks upon which you want your staff to focus: “You will know that I would be happy with your work on this task when…”
Think for a moment about the power of what we have suggested in this and the two previous articles. Staff arriving every day knowing what you want them to do, why it’s important to do those things and now a way to self-evaluate in the event you’re not around to thank and congratulate them.
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Why am I supposed to do it?
This is part of a mini-series of four articles about things your employees need to know. Our last piece was about their need for an answer to, “What am I supposed to do?”
It seems natural that right behind someone hearing a list of things you expect for staff to do, they would wonder, “Why?” Why is it important that I do these things?
Of course, the short, easy and dictatorial boss answer could be, “Because I told you to. That’s why.”
But, most everything we do in our work has some kind of history associated with it. Some exit doors in dementia wings are locked. There’s a good reason for that. Residents may be able to choose what they have for breakfast…and when. Again, there’s a reason, some history associated with that practice.
Everyone should be able to figure out why these things are done, shouldn’t they? Perhaps so, but sometimes staff doesn’t thing about these issues. If they don’t really understand why doors should be locked, they could think the rule is similar to turning out the light in the supply closet. Is it really that big a deal? So what if the door wasn’t checked a couple of times? Is the building going to fall down or something?
A few words from you (even though it may seem unnecessary) can help staff sort high priority actions from run-of-the-mill routine stuff. It heads off the N.E.T.M.A problem (Nobody Ever Tells Me Anything). “How was I supposed to know that? No one ever told me that.”
Sometimes giving good information about why you want something done requires that you do a little investigation and asking some questions. This generally happens when the only reason that comes to mind about why we should do something is because, “We have always done it that way.” Many times we have always done it that way for a very good reason. A few times, no one knows where the directive came from or why, and after thinking about it, there seems to be no reason to continue doing “the way we have for years.”
When your staff knows the most important things you want them to do and why it’s important to do what you ask, you’re halfway home. We’ll discuss the other two things your people need to know in coming articles.
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What’s Important
Job descriptions can become painfully long as employers try to think of every possible thing an employee might be asked to do. That’s why (decades ago) things got shortened. Job descriptions listed a reasonable number of reoccurring tasks and then added the phrase, “And, other duties as assigned.”
I would like to tighten the number of words even more. How about three items?
What are the three most important things you want a certain category of employees to be paying attention to every day? Obviously, people who work in dietary would have a different list from CNA’s.
But, if I wandered into your building and randomly spoke to direct care professionals asking them to tell me the three most important things they do…could they? That doesn’t mean they do only three things each day. The question would be searching for “top of mind” issues. If something slipped through the cracks on a busy day, none of these three tasks would be skipped.
So, here are some questions for you. What would you say are the three most important things you want you staff to remember each day? Have you told them those things? If you mentioned them in an upcoming staff meeting, would most folks say, “Oh, I know that. You’ve asked about them many times over the years.”
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Go ahead and laugh…for a few seconds. Then allow the reality that you have seen comparable lapses (in your building) to settle in.
You ask yourself, “What were they thinking?” Then you answer your own question, “They weren’t.”
When you observe obvious lapses of common sense, it’s important to quickly decide whether the person truly didn’t know how to do the task correctly or if it was one of those “It’s not my job” things. Only about 15% of failures to do a duty correctly are because the person lacked knowledge. Mostly, the person just didn’t want to do it.
Let’s look at the “lack of knowledge” possibility first. Sort things out by answering a series of short questions.
- Have you ever seen the person do this thing correctly?
- If you threatened them, could they quickly figure out the right approach?
- Has anyone shown how to do the task correctly?
If the answers are “no,” chances are good that training will cure the problem. Orientation of new employees is so much more than “showing them where things are” and explaining expectations like showing up for work on time. Ultimately, the person will report to you and will begin studying you to catalog your likes and dislikes. They also learn from other employees. Unfortunately, what they learn from others may not be what you want them to know.
Other employees want the new person to “fit in.” You may think that means “feel welcome.” And, to some degree, it does. But, mostly it means “don’t do things so well or quickly that we look bad.” Think through what you want new people to know about your values. Then be honest with yourself and decide if you actually follow up with current staff on those values. For example, you believe that caregivers should not smell like cigarette smoke when around residents. Do you consistently comment on that and take corrective action when you detect a smoky smell? If you don’t, your staff will “help” the new person by saying things like, “She will tell you that she doesn’t want us to smell like smoke, but she never says anything about it.”
We will spend more time on this important matter in coming articles, but, if you have a couple of spare minutes, take a shot at completing this statement with as many things as come to mind: “I think it’s important to _____________ .”
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And now ladies and gentlemen, Generation Y
Tom Brokaw named the people who were in their 20’s and 30’s during WWII “The Greatest Generation.” Those of us who are their children became known as the Boomers. We were (in most cases) the first of our families to graduate from college. We were catapulted into management jobs long before we were ready because the low birthrate in the ‘30’s meant there just weren’t experienced people to fill the vacancies.
Generation X, the first children of the Boomers, were given a wide pathway to decide what they wanted to be “when they grow up.” They were the first to decline moves to other cities and promotions to higher level (and more stressful) jobs because they weren’t worth the trade for a life they enjoyed in a town they loved.
Right behind them is Generation Y…those born after 1980. They have never known anything but praise and accolades most of their lives, and they have gobs of trophies and certificates to prove it. Many have graduated from college, and have student loans to prove it. They are bright, quick…and easily bored.
Rachel is a Gen Y. Even as a little person she always had a plate so full that beans sometimes fell off. Notice her head gear? She has been my princess for years. Have you met the Rachel on the right? If so, you know that she is an absolute bundle of creative energy.
If you supervise some Gen Y workers, you can use some skills that they respond to. Your boomers and Gen X employees also respond well, but Gen Y people wilt quickly in the hot glare of older supervision techniques.
First, get “out and about.” The great book In Search of Excellence told of things the very best leaders do. The authors wrote of MBWA (Management By Wandering Around). Out of your office, in the resident areas, you will see some breathtaking examples of your staff giving excellent care. When you see it, say something on the spot, “I really appreciate what you did. Ruth clearly enjoyed it, too.”
Second, ask for their opinions and suggestions…and wait until you’ve heard what they have to say. You can quickly kill creativity by saying, “We tried that a few years ago, and it didn’t work.” Obviously, if what they are suggesting can’t be done for legal, regulatory or expense reasons, you have to say so…but look for ways to modify the idea to make it work instead of driving a stake in its heart…and killing Gen Y creativity.
