Think how much more you and your team could do if you had the high potential people on your team as capable as you are. Think of the important work you could do if you could delegate more important things to your team members. Think about how much more energy you could put into leading your team to the next level if you could clear your plate of some of the work you have now.
One of the biggest tools you have for development is delegating. It’s important to think about delegating not just as assigning work, but as a technique for teaching, developing, and building capacity in your team.
The only true way to develop a potential successor is to delegate parts of your job so that someone else can practice doing it. By delegating tasks and projects to someone as though you were developing them as a potential successor, you are actually maximizing that person’s development.
Think about getting a couple of your high potential employees ready to step into your job. What could be more impactful to increasing the capacity of your team? This is relevant at every level of leadership.
Here are three important ways to use the succession idea as you delegate for maximum development. And if your goal is in fact to develop a successor, these are still the right things to do:
1. Let them practice your work
The first part of someone learning your job is about the work. You need to give them opportunities to practice working at your level.
A lot of times we think the way to motivate our employees is to have them work on the most fun or interesting projects or the less important things. That works to a point, but it does not do anything to help get a high potential employee ready for your job. Face it, how much fun work do you get to do?
You need to give them opportunities to practice the difficult, mind-numbing, controversial, boring, unsupported, no-win kind of work you deal with every day when you wake up.
What is the hardest and most distasteful thing you own? That’s what you give your high potential person! You give them the benefit of seeing what it is really like to be in your shoes.
They get to suffer like you do. But they get to work on bigger stuff. They get access to your network and stakeholders. They have the chance to do something creative and heroic to get this done.
2. Let them practice your relationships
The next part of getting someone ready for your job is to make sure they are practiced and comfortable with the social requirements at the next level. They need to be someone that your peers feel comfortable with and want to include personally. They can’t stand out like a sore thumb as the junior person in the room, who has no basis for being there
You need to give your employee a chance to practice these relationships. Give them opportunities to present for you. Arrange one-on-one meetings with them and your peers. Send them as your delegate to your boss’s staff meeting when you are out of town. (Go out of town if this never happens.) If your employee does not develop personal relationships with your boss and peers, they will not be capable of stepping in for you to free you up—because they will not be given the chance.
3. Let them practice your decisions
Okay. Here is where the rubber meets the road. You need to give someone a chance to practice making the decisions that you make. If you never delegate important decisions, you are fooling yourself that you are truly developing someone.
Think about the next few months of decisions you need to make: investments, priorities, partnerships, product road map choices, marketing strategies. Give your top performer the task of owning the project and making the decisions.
Let them feel the pressure of owning the outcome fully. Let them get the experience explaining, defending, and selling their choices. Let them get the experience fixing it if it goes wrong.
Is this scary? Yes. Might they choose wrong? Yes. Might they choose better than you? Also yes. The point is, if you never let them own and make key decisions, you are cutting off the single most important training you can give your successor. They will never be ready for your job without owning key decisions.
Failure is the Key to Delegating
Delegating some of your decisions opens up the risk of people getting it wrong. This can be scary but it is one of the most powerful ways that we all learn. There is no learning as great as that which comes after failing.
Many managers treat delegating exactly the opposite, as if it is their role to prevent failure by watching closely, jumping in and taking over, and fixing or modifying if it is not going well. If you think about this from a learning perspective, what you have just done is to ensure that no real learning occurs.
By always averting failure personally, you inadvertently take away the person’s motivation, need, ability to learn and ultimately the sense of ownership.
It’s kind of like teaching a child to ride a bike, by holding on and running alongside—and then never letting go—ever. For the rest of your life, you’ll be running alongside, holding on to prevent the potential fall. Think how much farther they could ride, and how many new things they could discover, if you weren’t still hanging on, running alongside and slowing them down.
So what happens if someone fails?
Well, when you fail it feels bad. It is embarrassing. It causes business problems, It causes trouble for other people—so it becomes a big personal motivator to fix it! Real learning occurs when you not only see what you did wrong, but need to live with and deal with the consequences of what you did wrong.
By creating the safety net and filling in all the hard parts for them, the person never really learns and never gets to truly experience what it means to succeed. But if you let a smart person fail, they will figure it out. Isn’t that how you got good at what you do? By doing it—trial and error, feedback, trying again. A capable person will learn how to really do it well if you give them a chance.
Also, if you always swoop in to save the day, you are ensuring that they will never get any better at the task than you are. You are putting an artificial cap on their development. Why not give them the chance to get even better at it than you are?
I have often delegated things that I thought I was pretty good at, and had my employee blow me away with their ability to exceed my capabilities. This, to me, is one of the best parts of management—when you can say, “Wow, that’s amazing. You did that better than I ever imagined it could be done. Bravo. Thank you. Look at this new capability my team now has!”
To your and your team's greater capability,
Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Trainer and Performance Consultant
SMART DEVELOPMENT
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