Empowerment Through Delegation

Building a Coaching Culture - #115: Empowerment Through Delegation === J.R. Flatter [00:00:00]: Delegating before you have to is absolute necessity. And the expectations in a workplace are that I'm gonna grow throughout my entire career. Even if I stay in the same profession for my entire working life, that profession is gonna require me to grow and grow and grow. Voice Over [00:00:16]: You're listening to the Building a coaching culture podcast. If you need to compete and win in the 21st century labor market as an employer of choice, this podcast is for you. Each week, we share leadership development, coaching, and culture development insights from leading experts who are developing world class cultures in their own organizations. And now, here's your host, JR Flatter. J.R. Flatter [00:00:47]: Hey. Welcome back, everybody. JR Flutter here with Lucas. Hello. Getting ready for beer 30. Him and some buddies. Lucas Flatter [00:00:57]: Right. Friday. J.R. Flatter [00:00:57]: Mike might crash their party. Alright. Today, we were gonna talk about delegation. And I know we've talked about this indirectly before. There's a strong relationship between courage, boldness, and delegation. There's also some negative aspects that people envision with regard to delegation. So I wanna visit those 2. So the positives and the negatives. J.R. Flatter [00:01:25]: Not to get too professorial early on in our chat. Whenever I think about delegation, I think about situational leadership model. And if you think about a quadrant in your mind that across different phases of willingness and ability. So if you're starting at 6 PM in your clock, that's the lower right quadrant, and you're very transactional in that quadrant. You're very directive. Here are 2 pieces of bread, a piece of ham, and a slice of cheese. Go make a sandwich, and when it's done, come back, and I'll give you your next task. I know that's very, you know, to the extreme, but, you know, to make that point. J.R. Flatter [00:02:13]: As a leader and as a coach of leaders, no one has time to do that with every responsibility that they have. And so over time, every member of your team with every task, you wanna get them up and over. And in the bottom left of the quadrant, back at 6 PM is delegation. And so the beginning of the journey is directive. The objective of the journey is delegation. A member of your team who's willing and able to receive delegation and that you have the courage to allow delegation. So as a leader and as a coach of leaders, I always have this rheostat in my mind, and I'm asking myself, where is the person I'm talking to in this specific task? And I'll give you example from my own life. Depending on who you talk to, I'm a pretty experienced coach. J.R. Flatter [00:03:20]: The International Coaching Federation twice now has told me you are a professionally certified coach. I've taken the assessor training, and now I'm a qualified assessor of coaching. And so I'm in the delegation part of coaching. International Coaching Federation said, go do your thing. Here are some parameters that we need you to follow. But other than that, come back every 3 years and we'll reevaluate you. But if you put me on a golf course or you ask me to speak Spanish, I'm a 2 year old child in both of those. If you go out and tell me, you know, go win the masters tournament next April, That's a foolish thing for you to do because this is never gonna happen. J.R. Flatter [00:04:06]: If you were to go bet on me to win the masters, you're gonna lose your money forever. If you bet on me to go engage in a conversation in any Spanish speaking nation, better not do that. So as a leader, you have to know your people well enough to know where they're at in that continuum. And as much as they're willing and able, mature them up and over to delegation. So that when they know that it's noon, it's time for lunch. And they know the course of action to making lunch. And, again, I'm making an example to the extreme, but we never have the the perfect member of our team that you can delegate any task under any circumstances to. But the vast majority of your team within their specializations and levels of experience can and should be able to go function without minute by minute or even day by day oversight. J.R. Flatter [00:05:12]: A lot of the members of our team, I don't talk to for months. I see them at the summer holiday and winter holiday. That might be it for the entire year. They're out doing great things. Lucas Flatter [00:05:26]: Yeah. And I I think you kinda touched on it, but this idea that, you know, this this is just I'm just delegating this to get it off my plate, you know, so I don't have to do it. It doesn't really matter to me who does it versus this task. I can see this person fulfilling it either because they're they have a strength in this area or, you know, maybe they have an opportunity for growth. We were joking before the episode how, you know, if somebody protests, it's like, oh, this is a learning opportunity. This is a growth opportunity. Yeah. J.R. Flatter [00:06:05]: Yeah. Yeah. Lucas Flatter [00:06:06]: But it's it it has truth to it. J.R. Flatter [00:06:09]: Yeah. And this is a maturation that you're describing as a human being and as a leader. We hear all the time in work environments. My boss is lazy and doesn't wanna do this, or my boss doesn't even know how to do x, y, or z. Like I asked our IT lead today on some simple IT task. In a well functioning organization, you as the leader should only do those things that only you can do. And oftentimes, the technical and cognitive tasks, and this is why we talk about the technical cognitive and emotional continuum. You won't do for an entire year if ever. J.R. Flatter [00:06:57]: You know, occasionally, I'll find myself like this morning, I spent a couple hours editing a Canva document. And every minute I'm doing that, I'm looking at the clock going, there are 10 other things that I could be doing. But I'm the only one this morning that could do that task and get it out the door to a customer who needed it. Potential customer who wanted it, I should say. And so I slogged through and did it. I'm not really good at it. I don't do it very often. And I don't feel the least bit humbled. J.R. Flatter [00:07:31]: Well, maybe I feel a little bit humbled, but I don't feel the least bit guilty that there are people that do that for a living on our team and probably could have done it in 5 minutes. But that's what having an efficient and effective team is all about. You know, you might ask yourself, why do we build teams? Well, we build teams because somebody's gotta do that piece and somebody's gotta do that piece and somebody has to focus on this piece. If we all just mobbed together and said, let's do whatever we feel like doing, that's not efficient or effective. So we task organize our teams based on experience and based on technical cognitive emotional skills to fulfill those roles. You know, we make the joke. Our CEO had a toilet brush in her hand a few months ago. Because at any time, we got to step out of our normal roles and go unclog the toilet. J.R. Flatter [00:08:31]: I do it myself. You do it. She does it. So we have to get emotionally intelligent enough to say, yeah. That's not the best use of my time as a member of this team and just get beyond that. I send things out of my office all day every day that I could do, And in many respects, could probably do better. But there's a better use of my time than that task. It's a fundamental principle principle of economics, and it's called economic advantage if you're in business. J.R. Flatter [00:09:04]: What is the most economically advantageous thing I can do with my time? And it's not building canvas, flyers. It's not plunging the toilet usually, but sometimes it is. And so you have to make those decisions, those informed decisions. But the ultimate objective is on the norm, you're only doing those things that only you can do. Lucas Flatter [00:09:29]: Yeah. I think about, you know, even the example of maybe the most precious duty that you have as a to be a parent to your child. Mhmm. We delegate that. I'm delegating that to teachers, to his karate instructor. And it's nobody would criticize me and say, like, why aren't you teaching him karate? You know, I don't J.R. Flatter [00:09:53]: I don't Lucas Flatter [00:09:53]: have a black belt. And my role there then can become a third party supporter. But if I was the one giving him the challenge, like I'm your karate coach, then it'd be hard for me to be on the sidelines also supporting you, you know? J.R. Flatter [00:10:09]: Yeah. And even if you did have a black belt, do you know how to teach karate as well as the sensei does? There's a lot of skill in teaching something beyond simply knowing how to do the task. And then, you know, you're sub optimizing his learning experience. And, yeah, you can't be dad. You have to be sensei. So let's go to the back to this idea. I wouldn't ask anyone to do something that I wouldn't do. That's one of those prevailing myths about leadership that you have to be in the hole digging alongside your team. J.R. Flatter [00:10:52]: If you watch the band of brothers, one of the most eye opening lines from the entire series for me was after the war was over and the protagonist in the series is Dick Winters. At first, he's lieutenant, but he he at the end of the series, he's a major. And he's talking to his commanding general, and he says, I haven't fired my weapon in a year and a half. It just blew my mind that they were in the middle of all those battles, and he hadn't fired his weapon in a year and a half. But when you stop to think about it, if the commander has to pull out their pistol and start shooting, we're probably in a world of hurt and something has gone horribly wrong. And so if you apply that same rationale to every task in your organization, it might be years before you jump in the hole and pick up a shovel. It might be months before you pick up the mouse and build a PowerPoint slide, build a Canva flyer. Because you've you've optimized your team and you've delegated before you have to so that they can experience those emotions, experience the joys of success and the angst of failures and learn from them. J.R. Flatter [00:12:12]: So that when it is time, they're ready. And every time you jump in the hole, you know, to go back to your joke, you've taken an opportunity from them to grow quite literally. It's one of the lessons that I've found into our students is that every time you choose not to coach, as part of what we teach is a coaching style of leadership to build a coaching culture. Every time you don't coach, you've taken an opportunity for that individual to grow away from them. And you can't get that back. You know, the clock only goes in one direction as much as we fantasize about going back in time. It's a one direction. What's the YOLO? It's a one direction life. J.R. Flatter [00:12:57]: Right? You only live once. You can't go back. So there's no reason to despair over it. But every missed opportunity, you have to grow your team and get them up and over that arc towards delegation, you can't have that back. And so one of the phrases that we use regularly is delegate before you have to. Delegate when the risk is low. If it all goes apart, it's not catastrophic. If you wait to delegate until the battle, until the water main breaks, until the earthquake happens, it's too late. J.R. Flatter [00:13:34]: You're gonna look around and no one's ready. And it takes a lot of courage, and it takes a lot of boldness to delegate, but you have to do it. Lucas Flatter [00:13:45]: We were just having a conversation, and we brought up, like, the concept of explain it like I'm 5, like, trying to bridge the gap between another person's knowledge on a topic. And I feel like there's a there's a balance. So, like, for example, you could only give somebody, like, a 100% of the context and knowledge they need to complete a task that you have if you're standing over their shoulder the entire time. So that's the one end of the extreme. And the other end is, here's like one sentence, go do it and come back when it's done. What's the healthy balance? What do you need to provide to somebody, like, context wise, information wise? J.R. Flatter [00:14:30]: Yeah. Beautiful question. Adults learn by doing, and adults learn by recall. And so make sure you're providing a lot of opportunities to do and a lot of opportunities to recall. And this is part of that lovely relationship between leadership and coaching. A coach and a coaching style of leadership within a coaching culture is going to naturally provide the opportunity for you to learn. It's going to measure the risk, measure the context, and do what they consider appropriate in that situation. But if you're a coach with a coaching style of leadership within a coaching culture, giving that opportunity to learn should be your default. J.R. Flatter [00:15:20]: Not spewing the answer of how you did it in 1980 or 1990. 2000 was nearly 25 years ago. So even at the turn of the century, the turn of the millennia, that was 25 years ago. And how relevant is it today? So stop and think for a second. What did we not have in the year 2000 that we have now? Yeah. Now the iPhone. Lucas Flatter [00:15:45]: Yeah. Mobile technology, social networks. J.R. Flatter [00:15:49]: Social networks. Lucas Flatter [00:15:52]: All those app, like, gig based apps and things? J.R. Flatter [00:15:57]: Yeah. I mean, there was an entire industry concerned with changing the date from 2 digits to 4 digits. I mean, think about the storage power that we lacked, that we only saved 2 digits of the date because we needed to save storage space. That's laughable now. I remember buying a flash drive that had capacity for a 156 megabytes, and it cost me a $100. Now you get terabytes for what? I don't know. Lucas Flatter [00:16:33]: Like, 2 terabytes for a $100 or something. J.R. Flatter [00:16:36]: I mean, my god. That's just, like, inconceivable. What was the, society that said anything that's ever needs to be invented has already been invented? Oh, man. All of my, scholarly friends are gonna dig me for that remembering the name. But that was early 1900 that they were already saying things like that. Are you Lucas Flatter [00:16:56]: getting doesn't seem true to me just from experience. J.R. Flatter [00:17:01]: And so, yeah, that's the labor market and the workforce that we're in right now. Delegating before you have to is absolute necessity. And the expectations in the workplace are that I'm gonna grow throughout my entire career. Even if I stay in the same profession for my entire working life, that profession is gonna require me to grow and grow and grow. We said it in the last session, upskill. It's not a, it's a necessity, not a good to have. So let's switch gears for a little bit and talk about how do I use this idea beyond my own life and in my coaching. And so as you're coaching and listening to the challenges that your leader brings in, are you recognizing in your active listening that it perhaps might be their unwillingness or inability to delegate? So let's say this is a very common phenol or a common occurrence in a coaching session. J.R. Flatter [00:18:05]: So you've gotten them into the room and they've carved out sufficient time to be coached. So that's probably a step in the right direction. But then they tell you, I have no time in my calendar to grow my team. I have no time in my calendar to learn Spanish or train to run a marathon or whatever they might want to achieve. That's a good time to go do a calendar study and say, what are you doing with the 24 hours you were given each day? I know I love to read the news. There's a few blog sites that I listen to or read, few podcasts that I listen to. But is that the best use of my time? And could I take some of that time and apply it to another area of my life? Or probably even more simply, could I delegate tasks that I'm either feeling I'm the only person who knows how to do this, or I have to do this because if I don't, someone else has to do it. And have that really difficult conversation with yourself. J.R. Flatter [00:19:15]: Am I the best one to go rebuild my website? Even though I could go figure out how to do it, it might not be perfect, but it'd be okay. It would take me a 1000 hours when it would take you a 100 hours. Is that the best thing to do? And so in our coaching, are we listening for and facilitating the discovery of this might be entirely an unwillingness or inability to delegate. From your own work in life, what do you what do you what do you think? Lucas Flatter [00:19:49]: I'm thinking about there's sometimes situations with organizations where where it's like one person might be the source of information. There's like a hub and spoke or something, and they're the center of information and how they can actually block other people from being productive because, you know, 10 people are waiting for you to finish x, y, or z. I feel intuitively just like with through this conversation, maybe the delegation frees up that person to answer 5 people's questions while they're all working in tandem, you know, concurrently. It almost, like, provides an opportunity to, like, create parallel tasks instead of, like, you know, 1 to 1 to 1 to 1. Yeah. So I guess, what are your thoughts on that in general? J.R. Flatter [00:20:44]: No. You're absolutely right. It's our obligation as a coach to point out to those who are coaching that they're not making the opportunity cost decisions that will allow them to optimize their leadership, optimize their effectiveness and or efficiency. Now it's after we've built trust and safety, and when the opportunity presents itself. And this goes back to this idea of self limiting perceptions. Someone may regularly happen, say to you, I don't have time for that. I have to do these 10 things before I can go home, or I have to do these 10 things before I could even think about developing my team members or, you know, having lunch with them. And we talk about, you know, being able to get out of your inbox and do those emotionally intelligent things that an emotionally intelligent leader in the 21st century needs to do. J.R. Flatter [00:21:46]: If you find yourself stuck in your inbox, either literally or figuratively, you can't get out of your email inbox because it keeps filling up. You should take a really hard look at yourself. And as a coach who's built trust and safety, you have an obligation to point that out, a gift, and give the gift of helping facilitate that discovery. That they've created the circumstances that have trapped them in their inbox. And that's not where a 21st century emotionally intelligent leader should be. They should be out building and sustaining relationships with other human beings, which, you know, we've all we focused most of our dialogue on the workplace, but it's equally important to work family itself. I don't have time to go to the gym. I don't have time to eat dinner with my family. J.R. Flatter [00:22:39]: I don't have time to go to the run on Saturday with my son. If you're telling yourself that, you better take some really hard looks at yourself. If your leader is telling you that, now granted, there are exceptional periods in our lives when it's all a gigantic w. I've had periods in my life literally working 7 days a week, not seeing my family, 20 hour days sustained, but that is surviving through heroic effort. As leaders of ourselves and our teams and our families and coaches of others who are leaders of self team and family, we have an obligation to coach them beyond heroic effort. Coach them to discovering paths to sustain success. If you show up at the finish line and you're broken or you're alone, you probably haven't won whatever it is you thought you were striving for, or I should say achieved. So all this goes hand in hand. J.R. Flatter [00:23:45]: Principles. What are the principles that the leader you're coaching is espousing? What's their technical cognitive and emotional alignment? What's their work family self? And what's their vision? And are all of those things aligned? And is there unwillingness or inability to delegate contributing to that misalignment? It's oftentimes the case. One of the things you talk about is finding joy in your life every day. If you can't get out of your inbox or the leader you're coaching can't get out of their inbox, I bet there's not a whole lot of joy in their life, and they need to find it And quickly, I guess, time goes by, and we're halfway through the year already, 25 years into the new century, the new millennia. Yeah. We need to stop and and do those things. What are your closing thoughts as we head out the door? Lucas Flatter [00:24:43]: I guess something that has been on the back of my mind throughout the conversation is just thinking about from the delegated person's perspective. If I'm delegating something to you and you need to solve a problem and I can give you some information to make that easier, I would say that I don't know if you need to communicate that at the beginning, but, you know, I'm here to help. And if if you just need, like, you know, 5 minutes to help you continue doing that, providing that opportunity to that person because I've definitely seen in the past, somebody goes off and does something and it takes, you know, 3 times as long as maybe it could have or should have. And if at the first hour, you know, help was given or reached out for, it would have made everybody get through it faster. So just thinking about if you're getting a task delegated, don't be afraid to ask for help. It's not weakness. And if you're delegating, leave that open line of communication. J.R. Flatter [00:25:53]: Yeah. And that's part of the culture again. I always say if I delegate something to you, I have a trust in you that you're gonna be able to figure it out. But if you can't, come back. But give it a try first. I won't delegate something to you that is immediately I need the perfect solution. I'll delegate something to you that I know you have time. You can experiment a little bit. J.R. Flatter [00:26:19]: So, you know, going back to the well of culture, do you feel comfortable enough to say, hey, boss. I know you delegated this task to me, but there's a missing piece of the equation that I haven't been able to discover. Could you just fill me in? You know, I I have the capacity to solve for 2 variables, but you gave me 3. And I might very well tell you, I don't know that either. Could you please go find out? But I'm also gonna give you the room, the time to go make that happen. There's a really good example from our own team here. I don't think Malena would be too disappointed if we talked about her. She's a coach on our team that's building her capacity, building her confidence, really her first job in this kind of environment. J.R. Flatter [00:27:08]: And last week, I delegated a task to her that I knew she was ready for, but she didn't know she was ready for. And her first thoughts were and she she posted this on LinkedIn, so I know she doesn't mind if we we talk about it. Her first thoughts were that I had thrown her into the deep end of the pool and ran off. Because the first day and the second day, I was there observing, but not participating. And the 3rd day, I didn't show up. I sent another person to observe her in the background that she didn't know was there. And in retrospect, she said this is exactly what I needed. And now I have the confidence that I know that I know, and that's what we call efficacy, and I could figure it out. J.R. Flatter [00:27:54]: And so now she's ready, willing, and able to to be the lead facilitator. At any time when I was there those 2 days or when the other person was there the 3rd day, She could have phoned a friend. She knew it, and I knew it. There were several times I was really tempted to jump in, but I chose not to because it wasn't of sufficient value to break her groove and take over as the lead facilitator if even just for a brief moment. And she came out of it multiplicatively more powerful than when she went in. And so that's the journey that we're on. I had watched her for months, given her little tidbits here and there. So for the last several weeks, every session we start, we do a mindfulness session at the beginning. J.R. Flatter [00:28:45]: She's been doing those mindfulness sessions. We do a focus competency in every session. She's been doing the focus competency, and she's been magnificent at it. And then she would pass on to a lead facilitator to do the lesson to her case study and the experiential assignment. And I said to myself, she's ready. I asked her if she minded if I did it, and she said, no. I can do that. And so she jumped off the 10 meter tower, and she dig magnificent. J.R. Flatter [00:29:17]: And she'll never be the same coach again. She'll never be the same facilitator again. She'll never be the same person again. There's a saying by a stoic philosopher, Heraclitus. No person ever steps into the same river twice, for they're not the same person nor is it the same river. And that's Melina at the end of last week. She's not the same person nor same facilitator, the same coach. That's what this whole journey that we've been talking about is is all about. J.R. Flatter [00:29:48]: Getting up and over the arc. So now I could tell her, hey. I need you to fill it next Friday. She'll say, yeah. I got this. Lucas Flatter [00:29:58]: Yeah. We mentioned in our previous conversation, you know, thinking about that hero's journey and J.R. Flatter [00:30:04]: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Lucas Flatter [00:30:05]: You refuse the journey. You say, no. I'm not ready. Then the old wise mentor says, you know, you got this. I'm here with you. But then the mentor disappears and the hero says, wait. Right? He'll need you. J.R. Flatter [00:30:20]: That was related last week. Yeah. I've quoted you several times on the archetypical hero. Yeah. Lucas Flatter [00:30:27]: Artypal. Yeah. We'll have J.R. Flatter [00:30:28]: to go look that up. But it's so it's such a classic response. No. I couldn't possibly do that. I'm not that person. Well, I think you are, and I'm gonna I'm gonna throw you off the the deep end of the pool. I'll be here to watch. I can jump in and save you if you need to, but then we, like, slink away. J.R. Flatter [00:30:54]: Alright, my friend. Lucas Flatter [00:30:55]: Alrighty. Yeah. J.R. Flatter [00:30:57]: We'll see you later. Well, that concludes this episode of building a coaching culture. I truly hope that this episode was helpful to you. If it was, be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. Maybe stop and give us a rating or review and share this podcast with someone who might find it helpful as well. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.