Topic of the week: Delegation

Hello readers !

So today is the final update to delegation!

In fact I went a step further than "communications" and even found you some helpful resources on the web to have a look at if you are interested further :o) As well as the strategic thinking approach to delegation

For those of you struggling with your hours per week at around 60 hours a week, I recommend to you this great little e-book offering advice on areas such as:

• Get more done in your job.
  
• Reduce your management headaches.
• Cut down on those 60 hour weeks!
• Have more time to spend with your family.
• Get a far better hit-rate when hiring new staff.
• Reduce the risk of losing your best people.
• Handle your people management with far greater ease.
• Lear how to create long-term motivation in your staff.

Take a little read here if you are interested further

http://51b85lqa4on2dcp9895j-ktm8v.hop.clickbank.net/

I recently purchased it but haven't finished it yet, so far its very interesting !

Remember Delegation is empowering ! It helps to save time and money, builds skills and helps to keep your employees motivated as they feel trusted and provide you vital support for busy periods and holidays. 

Consider it a partnership, but remember you remain responsible for the delegated work.  Take time in your delegation as it can have the opposite effect of causing frustration or confusion if not done properly.

Avoid micro management, of checking the details as they are being done or providing too much details on the individual steps if you can avoid it, you want the employee to be able to input and maybe even help you find a quicker, simple or better laid out way of completing the task on your behalf.

All this can help enhance your reputation not only within the team but also as a well thought of leader amongst your piers and colleges and above and can help you achieve a 'normal' 40 or close hour week.

I highly recommend now that you delegate yourself some rest on the week and come back at chopping the trees fresh on Monday morning !

For me I'm taking a small beer as a nice close to the quarter end fun of this week

Take care and have a great weekend!

Scott

Topic of the week: Delegation

So welcome back to this week's topic on Delegation!

So now you had a look around on the idea what to delegate, how to introduce it and use it for your employees I would like to take that all and wrap it in a package which looks enticing even for the employee to regularly help you in your leadership role and feel like they are benefiting and progressing as much as you are.

So I will start with examples of what to avoid and then progress to more and more positive outputs for both the leader and the employee:

• Follow these instructions precisely or do exactly what I say - there is no thought or freedom here only instruction 

• Ask them for options and then tell them you will decide which is the best - your missing their recommendation and maybe this is the most valuable input as they might combine or think about the options differently that a document list. 

• Take a look at this and we will sit together and decide together how to proceed - this is more coaching and development but encourages decision making from analysis 

• Take a look on this and decide on the outcome and I will approve it for implementation - this is normally a stage where a level of trust has been built and the employee has experience in being delegated similar tasks - we want to get here ! 

• This is your task, try and figure it out and let me know what you did - we can even go one step more and ask them not to inform you of the outcome, basically the level of trust here is good enough that they will basically add your authority to the situation and provide an outcome on your behalf one off. 

• The final level is to say that this is permanently your task from now on, take control of it and shape it the way that works best - basically if the employee owns it, even their mistakes are theirs to learn and grow and develop from. this is the highest level especially if we talk about multiple tasks, it give the employee confidence, skills and most importantly progress, if for instance you also have another role opening up it's as if they are already working themselves towards it in a constructive way 

There needs to be practice both from the employee and employer of regularly delegation to work towards the final steps, like a career plan, you don't start with the end result and work backwards the levels of trust normally.


So the advice here is practice, practice, practice ! :o) make yourself comfortable with this with different staff members, this will help develop your verbal approach to them and also at the same time give you feedback about each member's competencies and working styles to complement your own or contrast to yours in a positive way (like a technical person and an ideas generator together can provide great fruits).

Remember the best approach is to treat any mistakes as a learning curve not a way to get punish, otherwise no one will want to assist regularly and you will make it hard for your team to ever progress unless they are completely stubborn and try and prove you are wrong in a bad way to show you are not the leader of the team, they have something ahead of you.

I hope this has helped provoke some thoughts and you want to leave feedback !

Tune in tomorrow for more of the same !

See you soon

Topic of the week: Delegation

Hello and welcome back !

So today we will carry on the hot topic of the week: delegation

As promised yesterday, we should look at what to delegate now you have the basics of how to do it.

I wanted to start with the easy parts and get more complex to help you as you evolve.  I have found this nice flow chart which is a good start to figuring out what you want to do with you tasks, however its not everything you should consider and is a little bit brief for my liking but its a start to your decision tree:

To get more out of this and feel comfortable in proceeding we need to consider some pointers.

Things that are NOT recommended to delegate:

1. Hiring Employees
2. Firing Employees
3. Performance Reviews of your employees
4. Pay and company benefits (confidential information)
5. Policy Violations like dress code, absenteeism etc

Post delegation ideas:

• Encourage the inputs and energies provided by the team member and give feedback on the outcome if it was successful
• Plan follow on's for repeated tasks or additional training for more supportive tasks the main ones.
• Rotate the tasks if you are lucky enough to have a bigger team, so that holidays can be covered better and more people can support you.

Examples of delegation tasks (there are many more so take time to see you only you should really do this?):

• Regular reporting (including calculating monthly costs on a project, finding orders for regular audits, financial sales calculations etc.)
• Scheduling your calendar or meetings is popular with people important enough to have a secretary or an employee they consider close to that role
• IT developments (building the persons skills in this area I found to be most valuable to upgrading your systems and their functionality through testing and communication) - obviously a little more training would be key to making this a success
• Stock forecasting of items to make sure you always have enough supply for your customers
• Encouraging them to reply on your behalf is good to improve their communication skills and allows you to reply "yes i agree with points 1-5..." and show support within the team

Stay tuned for more soon on getting the employee more comfortable, freedom and control on the tasks at hand without them feeling like you are in reality micro managing their every move.

Take care until then ! 

Topic of the week: Delegation

Hello and welcome back

So this week I want to take you through Delegation as this a highly useful leadership skill that will help you with many things including time, team spirit, backups, skills development etc etc.

Before we get going, you have to have some trust in your team, focus on the brightest stars of the team, find the people who understand you to start with to speed up the process of trust.

I hear you say, "I don't have time to sit and delegate a task with the training to someone" - MAKE TIME! and you will be rewarded and helped a lot, and guess what? You will free up more time in the long term, but it will take some short term patience.

How to do it? -

• Whilst you are performing the task get one of your team members to come and sit with you and watch can be as easy as the training needs to be.  
• Make them take notes as they observe.  
• Give them the task next time and let them experiment and make mistakes as part of the learning experience.  You might be surprised... they might find a better or simpler way of the task you hadn't considered and help you both.  
• Don't kill the person if they take a little longer or make a mistake, be calm and encouraging.  say well done and that you highly appreciated their time and inputs, make them feel comfortable with helping you with tasks. Why? Because they might just come back and ask to help you with other things because you just became approachable at the same moment!

Successful steps to making this work:

• Explain the task and give it a start and end, don't leave your employee to guess the structure at least on the first attempt.  more on criteria of defining delectable tasks later
• choice the individual that should get something out of this, they show the most potential, have aptitude towards the skill set needed (attention to detail if its a spreadsheet, creativity if the normal solutions don't fit etc.), think about developing reliable potential for backup and time saving in the future.  dont split all your tasks to one person in your team only to avoid overload and favoritism
• is training needed, externally and internally and make some time for that if yes, it will reward you back in the future repeatedly.
• explain the importance or end result, so the employee knows what they are trying to achieve and also that gives them the aim of a desired outcome to know if they progressed correctly.
• make sure you give it a specific timeline for completion.  This is highly important otherwise it wont get don't when you want or need it.
• support the employee and communicate your thanks at the end and provide a feedback on the result if you will need to re-do the task repeatedly then its key they learn from their mistakes and get asked for their inputs on what could be improved. This might surprise you they come with different ideas and is always rewarding.

On the next update we will go through examples of what to delegate, a sort of short guide to what is appropriate, because you need to remain within your leading role and not allowing the employees onto something that is sensitive or confidential to other members of the team and departments...

Enjoy your day and see you soon !

Topic of the Week: Delegation

The work stops for the week and the weekend begins, but I'm busy at work on the next hot topic - Delegation !

• Working longer than 40 hours a week regularly?

• Want more support from your team?

• Feel like you are alone in your role and your employees aren't happy either?

All this and more coming next week... STAY TUNED! :o)

looking forwards to helping you learn and grow

Focus of the Week: Communications Part 3

Hello and welcome back to the hot topic of the week!

In this final part I will demonstrate effective examples of re-organizing the same messages you originally wrote.  So they are clean and simple to read and get your point across with minimal fuss.

As you remember from part 2 there were several ideas explored there.

This next part applies mainly to emails

The first few which link together I want to highlight is not writing your messages in big un-organised blocks.  To split it out into paragraphs with an Introduction, Middle and an End.  Whilst doing this Bullet points and/or numbering idea is a great visual help.  Here's an example with all specific numbered points and highlighting improvements for you - take note that the numbers help to indicate a flow, so using numbering is better than bullets in this case:

So that hopefully helps to clarify a little for you some points, I know you want more... its coming don't worry.  so now a similar example using bullet points works just as effectively when there isn't a priority of one point more than another or a link following on from each point directly - again not your introduction, middle and end clearly laid out:

Now to Progress the wording used.  As I previously mentioned we want to approach the wording in a positive manor, to increase engagement and reader buy in to work with you. Noticing the improvement of the wording "You" with using directed wording and highlighting the benefits more than originally, to get what you need out of your communication:

The next section would be helpful with Letters and memorandum's 

including claiming, responding positively to that and also refusing claims

In cases you would also be sending a letter the same structures of alteration applies to the wording, but with some additional wording in different cases of writing to claim something needing amendments and a reply to that.  Notice the attention to details (highlighting of facts) of date, time, location, price etc. to reduce unnecessary questions in reply reducing your speed of resolution.  Also the removal of emotional wording which in the end is confusion the points of notice and might possibly reduce the positivity of reply or reduce a level of service you could have got:

This next example is of how to do an adjustment letter in reply to something like the above.  Points to note are the opening positively to help the feeling of resolution, gaining or re-gaining trust in processes and improvements and closes respectfully to give the customer a nice satisfied feeling of closure or further actions possible:

Now the final example of providing bad news without making it feel like its the end of the world, taking note of the wording or refusal without saying it (indirect wording), starting and ending of a positive note to allow a sandwich effect to soften the blow of the main message:

In Conclusion

I hope these examples have provided you with valuable insights of how a simple message which didn't always start bad can be vastly improved.  As a third part to this weeks communications to be the most effective for you, I highly suggest you practice with some of your own or others communications, as they say practice makes perfect.  Take a few examples, take time to highlight areas of importance to bring out of the message and be highly critical.  re-write the first message once, then start again with your modified copy to see if that provides anymore insights and positive changes for you.

I hope this proves useful to you and I hope you enjoyed the material shared here.  I have not only used this in my work but also my personal life, helping friends and family to claim improved situations with government offices and also businesses.  Try it out!

I would appreciate any feedback you would have, just add it in the comments below and at this moment I will wish you a great weekend !

Until next time

Focus of the week: Communications part 2

Hello and welcome back to the hot topic of the week!

So lets get straight into this after the nice introduction the other day.

You want to follow as many of the bullet points below as you can.  

Why you might ask? 

Because this is what is going to cut down confused and unnecessary replies to your nice and newly corrected  correctly expressed messages.  Its going to highlight you actually know what you are talking about.  Making your authority on the subject valued and respected and people are going to believe you know what you are talking about (whether that is true or not it doesn't mater), more people will value your interacts and come back to you as  reliable source of thorough and complete knowledge and not try and waste your time when they do.

A few common simple  rules you should try and follow:

• Like I said the other day, we want an introduction, a middle and an end

• From that you want 3 distinct paragraph's as a minimum.  For example, you should not be writing your text in one big combined block.  Separate subjects into paragraphs to make it easy to read and re-read/reference again.  It makes it easier to follow.

• To help in your easy to read format use bullet points or numbering like I'm currently writing within the actual subject matter of your reply (not the whole email from beginning to end), within the middle section of your email to help identify several subjects.  Allowing the reader to pick out a section to easily re-read or get clarifications on.

• Take a moment to re-read your email for spelling, grammar corrections and implement sufficient spacing for easy of understanding.  I quickly type out my emails in a messy format immediately to capture my ideas and then go back through it and try and clean it up for ease of reading and to make sense in a flowing way and with polite wording (sometimes a subject gets heated, you want to delete your emotions you just slammed down in the first draft and get to the point-leaving the useful information inside there without the fight, it will also help remove the emotions from the other side when you get to this stage).  You may say, I don't have time to mess around like this with ever communication... but how much time will you spend to have to reply 2-3 times to clarifications? Will the benefit be now or in the long run?

• Be Specific = reducing replies from confusion you have caused.  Dont say "Wednesday coming" - for example use, "This will happen on Wednesday 15th May at 2PM in the location or (telephone number)."  Just by doing this you will already get some questions of your own, like what time do I want to run this meeting? 2PM is now the time because you had to stop and check your calendar.  You had to book a meeting room now you know that or setup a dial in number where you will be at that time and date.  This just helped you remove 2-3 simple replies from external sources.

• Get to the point first! Don't waffle along on the subjects then make your point.  Some people might have already gave up reading if they have already been confused on your reasoning and logic before they know what they are reading about.  This means put your subject up front and in plain sight, the hook in the mouth so to speak.

• You want people to sign up and work with you on something? Try and re-write the message to sell it.  Use positive wording, get them involved already in the reading stage.  Use the words "You" or "for your benefit" or "especially for you and your team/friends/family", make them feel they are the focus of what they are already reading.  Reduce your third person wording like "they" and "others" - try instead "your colleagues", "popular with the team of..." as examples

These are some basics which should already help you in clearing up your approach if practiced and used regularly you will only get better at them with time.

Especially for the last bullet point, I hear you saying to the points above "I like that, but I don't get how to use it?" - so in my next update, I'm going to give some examples I have saved from real life and then show you how to change it to feel and read better... right on your screen to get out of the theory and into practice mode... as the popular saying goes, practice makes perfect.

Stay tuned for the next installment coming soon.

Take care until then

Focus of the Week: Communications

Hello and welcome back - introducing the hot topic of the week!

This week I want to look at how important communications can be.  You may think (as you read the start), this is only for non native speakers... THAT'S NOT TRUE

It will help with reduced returned questions from our original emails an letters, help you cut out the waffle and get straight to the point.  Its also for all people, new or old in their roles, native English speaking or not.  I'm obviously a native English speaker, but the material I will share this week helped me more than I could have ever guessed... its from my MBA course, Management Communications subject, a 6 week course which I will break down for you here.

What I'm going to do is break it down into pieces across the week, I'm also going to state the obvious so that everyone is on the right tracks and clear about the full picture.

For instance it might sound obvious, but how many of you actually implement this next point?

Start you communication with a hello and an introduction, a middle (the meat of the reply) and then end with thanks, closure and contact details.

Most of us just jump straight into the replying part, sometimes there are several subjects and your introduction should clarify which you will start with and carry onto etc.

more to come tomorrow...

Welcome and my personal leadership values

My personal leadership values and a welcome note.

I had a great motivating weekend in Zurich recently which taught me alot about adding the value to lives of others.  It finally has pushed me to get all my thoughts down for my great followers online! J

I want to share my experiences as a leader within a multinational company, living in a different country from my own and also hearing feedback and information from others as well to enrich the experience more and learn new things from others (I’m not a Guru – yet! J )

But back to the start – I have been a manager for 3.5 years, I started managing 1 country in customer services, which progressed to two countries in customer services, after my initial success and now to a third team, sales administration with employees working from home and in the office all with very unique ways of working between the very separate teams.

I regularly met and exceed KPI (Key Performance Indicator) targets, although at the start with each team it was not always like this-that was a long tough and challenging road, believe me.  In Customer Services if you make a mistake, you are on the sharp end of the result normally, so with a team making mistakes that is magnified horrifically. However from my experiences I have designed and development KPI’s myself for all of the European, Middle East, Russia & Africa Customer Services supporting them regions.

I have kept to my values from the start and have been criticised and also praised for my progress.  I learn from my mistakes, but still making mistakes is not always seen as a good thing in my company.  But I feel it has benefited me to become one of the best now in my area.

My top 5 values are:

1. Team First - I’m only the conduit of their work
2. Delegation - in the right dosage to a health team
3. Honesty and integrity – privately and publicly for the team members and also the external organisation
4. Analyse, correct and COMMUNICATE – learning from the mistakes of the past and making them a learning experience not a punishment
5. Thinking outside the box – if you can’t win in the current systems, is the system possible to achieve?

I want to go into each in a separate post and expand, so you know me better and I can get feedback from you.  Along the way I would like to also provide you with several resources I have used over the time, free from me and my studies and also recommendations of things I have brought which I hope you can enjoy too!

I have been lucky enough to be able to afford to attend an MBA – Master of Business Administration, in my personal time and learn and grow more-it’s still in progress but I’m close to the end.  I was not sponsored by my company but I have enjoyed the benefits in my knowledge and there are something’s I would like to share with you some great ideas I had from that.

Until the next update, enjoy the rest of your day! J

Scott