Get others involved
Once you have started cascading your mission and vision through the organization,
you need the involvement of other leaders to
keep the information flowing.
Dawes believes that you enable others to
communicate by delivering the message to
them, and then empowering them to deliver
the message to those further down the organizational ladder.
It takes a level of discipline on your part.
Dawes says delegation means trusting that
your employees will do the job, even if they
don’t do it the way you used to do it and
even if there are some mistakes along the
way.
“If you’re going to delegate something to
someone, you need to be able to let them
make mistakes,” he says. “If you’re going to
look over their shoulder, if you’re going to
micromanage someone, you might as well
do it yourself. You have to delegate to someone and truly let them have ownership of it,
let them know that you’re available for questions and let them know that the task
you gave them is their responsibility.”
It’s something that Dawes had to learn on
the job as Hendricks has grown over the past
20 years.
“Before we were the size that we are, I pretty much handled all of the department managers, who reported directly to me,” he says.
“As we grew and got bigger over time, I gave
up some of that reporting to me. We brought
in vice presidents to the organization who
managed several groups of departments.
“That was a learning curve for me because I
used to interface with them all the time, and
now I was removed from that almost-daily
interaction and had to rely on someone else in
between. I had to learn from a delegation
standpoint to let go. I didn’t want to interfere
with the vice president, and I had to make sure
that I wasn’t going to people or letting people
come to me, bypassing the vice presidents.”
In that transitional period, Dawes had to
remember one of his basic rules about delegation: As long as the job gets done, it does-n’t really matter how it’s done. If you’ve
asked your managers for help in communicating, strategizing or anything else, don’t
refuse the help because it’s not the kind of
help you think you need.
“Everybody does things differently, so that’s
part of letting go,” he says. “You have to be willing to let them do something their way. You
hopefully will come to the same answer. As
long as you get there and the end result is what
you are both looking for, that’s OK. That’s
where practice and taking your time come in.
You have to be comfortable with yourself and
who you are as a person. You can’t get hung up
with having to do it your way.”
