By Tamara McLendon –

This blog post is coming to you courtesy of Nick Wiley, a staffer who’s been with Longleaf for a while. He’s been with us through all of our growth, has participated in developing new processes, and he’s about to enter his third position in our company, so he’s seen a lot about how we operate.

When I asked the team to shoot me some ideas for blog posts – things that plague us and our customers – he wrote this: “DELEGATE.” In all caps. He must really mean it.

He fleshed it out (in a slightly calmer tone of capitalization) to say that, as he’s making the rounds to talk to prospects and just networking, he often finds himself talking to people who are tasked with managing their company’s IT and yet who have no authority to actually make any decisions about it. It’s frustrating for everyone involved.

These people have had the task of managing their IT infrastructure assigned to them by their bosses, but don’t have the necessary authority or autonomy to actually move the needle on it. If they’re not coasting along with the status quo and they want to actually make improvements, or even solve existing problems, they need to ask for approval. For everything.

There’s no surer way to stifle progress, and reduce employee satisfaction, then forcing your people into that box.

The benefits to delegating effectively can also be found in hard numbers. Thomas Hubbard, a professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and his co-authors studied the influence of delegation on the earnings of lawyers. They found that the median lawyer who delegated properly to associates earned more than 20% more than they would have otherwise, and top lawyers earned at least 50% more.

We don’t know if that finding would apply to other professional services firms, but I’d guess the answer is yes. You, as an individual, only have so many hours in the day, and so much mental energy. It’s a no-brainer that annexing the time and mental space of others would help you do more, and better, in less time.

What do you mean by the word “delegation?”

People usually use the word “delegation” to describe these two different sets of instructions:

1) “Please do this task that I’m responsible for, exactly how and when I tell you to, then come tell me when you’re done. I may or may not explain why.”

2) “I want you to become responsible for this area of focus, with the goal of achieving these specific results. As long as you’re achieving the results we need, and your actions fit our corporate culture, we’re good.”

Yes, they’re both “delegating,” and there are certainly many times when small-scale delegation is desirable and necessary. The second type of delegation, though, where you’re assigning full responsibility to someone else, not just a task, is where there are serious gains to be found.

You get back time and mental energy in your own day to focus on other issues. You reward your employees with autonomy and career-enhancing experiences. You get access to the good ideas of those employees, who might otherwise not have found an opening to share them.

It’s hard to do it, though. It requires you to release control of something that was previously your responsibility, and that you probably have a firm idea of what the right way is. You need to walk the line between just throwing the task at them and micromanaging them.

It also requires you to reliably hold another person accountable for their results, rather than keeping them on such a tight leash that they wouldn’t have an opportunity to make a mistake. That doesn’t happen by accident. You need a process whereby the expectations are very clear, any limitations and guidelines are spelled out and agreed upon, and where you’ll circle back around for that accountability conversation regularly.

The Delegation Process

The goal with delegation is to move your chosen employees through the four stages of competence, which appears to have originated here but is in broad usage in discussions of management and education.

• Unconscious incompetence. At this stage, they don’t know what they don’t know.
• Conscious incompetence. They know they have a lot to learn, but they have a grasp on what knowledge they’re missing.
• Conscious competence. They know they’ve got a handle on it, and they’re making good decisions.
• Unconscious competence. They’ve moved into mastery, and they can use intuition to arrive at the right decisions, even when the facts may be incomplete or conflicting.

As an example, my middle child is at the level of conscious incompetence when it comes to cooking. He can follow recipes well, and he knows when he encounters a technique that he’s not familiar with. He knows enough to stop and ask the necessary questions.

On the other hand, he’s at the level of unconscious incompetence when it comes to doing laundry. It doesn’t occur to him that there are things he doesn’t yet know, and so he plunges head-long into disaster. All his shirts turn pink, and he is shocked – shocked! – that such a thing could even happen.

Depending on your employees’ level of competence, conscious or otherwise, they’ll require more or less from you to set them up for success in the newly delegated area of focus.

The below four steps are the ones we use at Longleaf to step through these levels, and to ensure that we’re deliberately moving from one stage of competence to the next, without rushing. We want to set the employee up for long-term success, and that can take some time.

1. Give them the context and a hard target. A wide-ranging conversation about the impact of the task or area of responsibility can help the employee put it into context, which helps them retain it better. They need to know what steps to take, why it’s important, and what the exact results are that you will be holding them accountable to. You want them to eventually get to the point where they can decide on their own steps, and they need to know the reason and the results if they’re going to get there.
2. Do it yourself, while they watch. If this is a single task, this can be pretty quick. If you don’t have good documentation, have them take notes as you go, so you can discuss any missing steps or confusion in that moment, and then they’ll have a good write-up to refer to and share afterwards. If it’s a larger project or on-going process, they’ll shadow you for a period of time, again taking good notes and reviewing them with you.
3. Watch them do one, while you sit in the background and take notes. Depending on how high the stakes are, you may or may not want to step in to help prevent errors the first few times. The alternative is to batch up your comments and deliver them at the end. Repeat this step until they are getting it right every time.
4. Ensure they’re getting the results by actually checking. Don’t teach them how to do it, and then just assume everything is going according to plan. Have a recurring check-in meeting to review results and re-teach rough spots, or check irregularly, but frequently. They need to know that you’re paying attention, and that you are available to help if they hit obstacles.

Tracking What You’ve Delegated

That last part – inspection – is impossible if you don’t have it written down somewhere what you’ve delegated. You don’t remember until you’re walking the dog two weeks later. “What ever happened to that thing I asked Susan to do?”

In my GTD-based system, I have two ways of tracking such things.

If I’ve retained ownership of the project, but I’ve asked for help on one or more steps, I put a Next Action in my “Waiting For” list like this: “SB: Report on project profitability by 10/24? 10/18.” I asked Susan B. to write up the report, to be delivered on or before 10/24, and the date I made the request was 10/18. I now can see very quickly who owes me what, and I can decide if I need to follow up with them. I do this for all outgoing requests, whether they’re internal to my business, or out to clients or vendors.

If I’ve delegated a whole process, it’s likely to a person who reports directly to me, and we have a regular check-in meeting. I would then put a Next Action in my “Agendas” list: “SB: Check in on weekly expense reporting transition.” In the body of the task, I’d paste in the expected results, and any additional information that would help us talk about it. I’d ask if it’s on track, or if there are any obstacles I can help remove.

The bonus of always using employee initials in these sorts of Next Actions is that when we have our check-in meetings or when we just happen to be talking, I can do a quick search to see if there’s anything else I needed to talk to them about. Both of the above Next Actions would pop up if I searched for “SB.”

The goal is to apply the collective brain power and available time of your whole team to the job at hand. If you have the right people and the right delegation process, you’ll get more of the right things done, without losing control of the end result.

By Tamara McLendon –

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a new technique we were using to carve out time to work strategically on our business – we were going to walk away from the business for three weeks. I promised then that I’d write about the lessons learned, so here we are.

It was a terrific trip. We walked through castles and ruins, hunted for fossils on the coast, communed with sheep high on windswept moors, and savored a fair number of pints at the local pub.

Before we left, our management team had conversations about what the sticky spots were going to be and set up some guidelines to ensure that we were all clear on when contact was justified and/or required. We tried to provide a decision-tree that would help the team feel confident that they were making the right call, and help Harvey and I gain some peace of mind that no news really was good news.

The Rules of Engagement

Harvey’s rules were focused on customer service and serious technology outages.

Is the issue Mission Critical? If so, has one of these criteria been met:

• Every known possible remedy has been attempted.
• The duration of the outage is greater than our promised service levels.
• A customer relationship is at risk.

If yes, then the Service Manager should contact Harvey via text message. He will respond with guidance, but will not put his hands on a keyboard. In fact, he didn’t even bring his laptop, and I certainly wasn’t going to loan him mine!

My rules included a list of events that would warrant contact in the areas of HR, legal, payroll, benefits, and finance. Is there a legal problem? Is an employee resigning? Yes, please contact me. If we get a letter from the IRS, for goodness’ sake, tell me! And in all cases, contact should be through our Project Manager, who is also acting as my back-up in areas of administration. I’d already notified our benefits consultant that I’d be away, and gave her the heads-up that our PM had authority to execute on previously made decisions in my absence.

Not a lot of rules, but they were big ones. We assumed that, for the most part, the management team would be able to handle the vast majority of typical events. It was the out-of-the-ordinary that we needed to give some guidance on.

What happened while we were out?

We returned to work to find the company still humming along. The place hadn’t collapsed and, while the team was nice enough to say they missed us, they did just fine in our absence.

On the technical side, things went quite smoothly. Harvey was notified a once or twice of outages and major client issues, but the team worked through it independently. They notified him, but just to keep him in the loop, not to ask for his participation.

Things were a little rougher on the administrative side. We had a data glitch in our financial software due to me trying to do month-end invoicing from abroad. The delay in my regular bookkeeping activities meant that our customer payment portal was out of date. And when the team had to run a customer invoice off of the regular cycle, they had to dig the relevant procedure out of our regular month-end invoicing documentation.

Our Project Manager faced the brunt of these gaps, and he knocked it out of the park. But he shouldn’t have had to. I had a big gap in our finance procedures and documentation.

Identify the Gaps

This was the purpose of the whole exercise. Yes, we wanted a real vacation, which we hadn’t had in a long time, but the goal was to step aside and see what gaps would emerge in our process.

It turns out that the assumption we all made – that the technical side would be where the holes where – was incorrect. Harvey has been delegating and cross-training over the last year, and the result is that he no longer needs to act as an engineer on a daily basis.

To be fair, we did get a little lucky. Almost as soon as we returned, a long-time client had a major outage that Harvey did have to play a role in resolving. He did get hands-on to help with an immediate work-around so that the client was supported, but then he retreated to a position of adviser to the engineering team. And as predicted, they got the job done.

The problems we faced while on the trip itself all lay on the administrative side. My insistence on keeping all of the bookkeeping tasks to myself had caused most of the problems. Message received!

Within a week of returning home, I contacted a highly recommended bookkeeper and set her to the task. I’m no longer responsible for the day-to-day bookkeeping tasks (logging receipts and deposits, matching up expenses with accounts, etc.). My job now is to feed the raw data to the bookkeeper as it comes in. I still pay the bills and set up payroll. And as CFO, I’ll review the reports she sends me and take any necessary actions.

We also learned that we need to tighten up our admin and finance SOPs, so that’s on my actions list for the coming weeks.

Backfilling with Strategic Focus

The reassignment of these day-to-day tasks has freed up a couple of hours a day for both Harvey and me.

Harvey’s been reading voraciously about product development, sales best practices, marketing, and M&A. He’s owning his position as CEO in away that he’s never had the bandwidth to in the past. He’s working with the service team to recast his Rules of Engagement to meet the needs of the company now that he’s back at work, but not returning to an an engineering role.

I’m working with our new bookkeeper to streamline our data flow and communication, and with our Project Manager to fill our documentation gaps. I’ve always been a big reader of business books, but I’m revisiting topics that will help me step up my game. This morning, the topic was financial projections. Tomorrow, I’ll be asking for input on dashboards and metrics. Thursday, writing documentation is on my to-do list.

Thanks to this freedom to refocus on the big picture, I’ll also take a moment to revisit our functional org chart, which I also wrote about in the previous blog post.

Right now, that org chart says that I expect to spend 25 hours per week in my combined role as President & CFO, and then another 15 on Marketing, Bookkeeping, and HR. But I frequently overspent time on the Bookkeeping side. At this point, I feel confident that I can leave just 5 hours total in Bookkeeping and HR, and reassign the other 10 to my executive functions and to ramp up my Marketing work.

Harvey has 15 hours booked on the org chart as a Systems Engineer (which he always overshot, so it was more like 20 to 25 hours in practice), which he’ll be able to reallocate to his role as CEO.

The result of stepping away from our business for three weeks was that we shook loose the several lingering gaps in our processes, and identified the next steps to help us grow as an organization, a team, and as executives. We reset our own expectations, and that of the team, for our roles within the company, and were able to write new job descriptions that emphasize the big picture and the long-term.

And, not for nothin’, we were able to take our kids on a three-week trip to the UK! How is that a thing we even got to do? It’s crazy! And it’s entirely thanks to this amazing team we have. They’re the reason the trip could happen, and why the business is successful, and why our customers are happy.

I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no matter what happens with any individual — me and Harvey included — the business will continue doing its good work and providing a good quality of life for those involved. It has a life of it’s own now, and Harvey and I are just contributors. That’s a very comforting thought.

By Nick Wiley –

We’ve all been there. We’ve started new jobs, stumbled our way through the first few weeks of training, planted our collective rears in freshly-Lysoled office chairs, and put our heads down ready to take on the world. Then in walks our supervisor or seasoned colleague with some exciting news:

I know they taught you to do it a certain way in corporate training, but this is how we do it in this department. This is where we store our files. This is the printer we use.

Imagine, for a moment, that every single team in your company is operating exactly the same way. Independent of each other. Disjointed. In many ways, you don’t work for a company. You work for a collection of mini-companies.

In all my years of IT engineering and consulting, I have never had a meeting with an IT manager who wasn’t riddled with angst and long-running frustration from years of supporting disparate systems for the collection of mini-companies they’ve themselves charged with supporting. As a result, IT has gotten a reputation as a reactive, thankless field staffed primarily with curmudgeons who’d rather not be helping you. Rest assured — your friends in IT aren’t crabby because they have anything against you. They’re crabby because they know you probably aren’t going to take their advice when you ask them for better solutions.

Why aren’t you going to take their advice? Because your boss didn’t tell you to. Your expectation is that you’re going to follow your own preferences, or your immediate department’s protocols — not your corporate standard operating procedure.

A 2017 survey of 388 CEOs by Gartner revealed that only 42% had started to take real control of their business technologies through a “digital business transformation”, and that “half of CEOs have no digital success metric.” We know that what gets measured gets managed, so what does it mean for your business that you haven’t addressed your technology in a strategic way?

I’ll state the problem as clearly as possible: Companies have problems that need solving. Companies have access to IT professionals, internal or external, that solve problems for a living. With surprising frequency, the leaders of those companies haven’t created an environment where their IT professionals can solve those problems.

What can executives do?

If you are an owner or executive, the first step is to address your company’s technology head on, even if you hate it, fear it, or have no personal interest in it.

Strategic Planning

Engage in the process of choosing whole-company technology solutions for communication, work management, finances, project management, etc. and then bake those solutions into the entire company’s culture. Then, pull those technologies and the experts you’ve hired to manage them into your strategic planning. A suggested framework might look something like this:

• Work with company leadership and their teams to identify business problems
  • This should be a thorough process that includes interviews with staffers and analysis of critical processes
• Coordinate with IT to organize and assign priority to the problems identified
  • Complicated problems that require change in employee behavior are always very difficult to implement. But, that doesn’t mean that tackling them isn’t worth it. Plan accordingly and limit the number of problems to solve each year.
• Flesh out targeted problems into achievable goals
  • Set metrics that clearly define progress and ultimate success

Set Employee Expectations

It may sound extreme, but consider adjustments to compensation plans that include incentives for proper use of company-owned tech. You’ll be amazed at how quickly employees start to follow the rules when they become “part of the job.” Document and include procedures that standardize and define your company’s tech culture. Some examples might include:

• Communication: i.e. when to use e-mail vs. phone vs. chat?
• Password management
• Accurate, consistent use of company ERP/CRM/file storage
• Continuing technology & security education

Without that direction, teams and individuals will begin inventing their own solutions for all the problems technology can solve. I’ve literally consulted for a company that hired people to pick up papers from one printer and scan them into another disparate system on the other side of the room. All day long. You can do the math on how much that was really costing them.

Be Consistent

I have observed over the years that many executives, while often individually tech-savvy, tend to isolate themselves in a bubble of non-standard technology. This phenomenon is most sterotypically witnessed in the arms of the bright young CEO, hellbent on their “need” to carry a Macbook or Surface despite company policy demanding their uglier, more rugged, more-Thinkpaddy, and objectively more-supportable counterparts.

There is a superior alternative. Work hand-in-hand with your IT experts to develop policies and procedures, then hold yourself accountable to said procedures. If it’s a good idea for non-executives to change passwords frequently, it’s an even better idea for executives to do so. If it’s important for data-entry to be accurate, fast, and consistent, it’s just as important for reporting, analytics, and decision-making to be accurate, fast, and consistent. To revisit the original example — your IT manager doesn’t want you to carry an ugly black plastic laptop because they want you to be miserable — they want it because parts, service, and replacement are available within 24 hrs in almost any location in the known world.

By facing technology head-on, you’ll see improvements in communication, efficiency, profitability, free time, company morale, accountability and reporting, practically every facet of your day-to-day life. Leaving IT out of your strategic goals is like sleeping on a cheap mattress and wondering why your back hurts.