Get diligent about delegation
An extension of good communication is good delegation to your
managers. Boyle says it’s especially true as your business grows. You
won’t be able to be in every place at just the right time to reinforce
your messages, so you must develop a strong team of managers and
rely on them to lead in places where you can’t lead as effectively.
Boyle says a good delegation strategy helps your managers as
much as it helps you and the company.
“My nature is, ‘I can probably get this resolved in 10 minutes, but
if I give it to someone else, it might take hours, so I should just do
it myself,’” Boyle says. “But I’m not developing my people if I do
that.
“I have to challenge myself to let go of certain things and let other
people do them the way they think it should be done. Then you sit
down and evaluate why they’ve done it the way they’ve done it and
use it as a learning tool for both them and for myself.”
The willingness to delegate comes back to building trust within
an organization. Just as you want to build trust with your community through outreach activities, and you want to build trust with
your lower-level employees with clear communication, Boyle says
handing your direct reports key tasks and responsibilities is a way
to build employee confidence.
That’s not to say you should shovel all of your responsibilities
onto your managers at once. Boyle says he starts small, then
adjusts the level of responsibility for each manager based on the
results.
“It’s letting them take a little bit of risk, letting them take some
ownership for the outcomes, seeing how well they do it, what their
success is, what their failures are — and, more importantly, how
they deal with success and failure,” he says.
“If someone takes on a task, fails at it and blames everybody else,
I’ll be less inclined to continue to delegate to them. But if they take
on something, it doesn’t work out and they own up to it, then I’m
going to feel much more comfortable giving them a more meaningful delegated project because I know they will take ownership
of it for the good or the bad. That’s how I get the trust factor
resolved.”
Perhaps the most important lesson to learn about delegation is the
potential consequences of not doing enough of it. Boyle cautions all
CEOs about the damage an overloaded schedule can do to your personal life.
“I have been in situations in the past where I have not done a
good job of delegating, and it becomes almost unmanageable,” he
says. “It starts to interfere with you getting the rest of your job
done. It creates the need for you to be at work more, which creates challenges at home.
“If you don’t learn to delegate, you will be largely inefficient.
That’s why you have to trust people and let them learn from their
mistakes, even though that’s tough to do sometimes.”
HOW TO REACH: National City Bank/Michigan and Northwest Ohio, www.nationalcity.com