Dave Stitt Quotes

The Delegation Feedback Conversation has a job to do. For it to be of service to the delegation project it must cover all the bases by allowing the following things to happen: The delegatee gives an accurate report on progress made in reaching agreed milestones. An assessment is made of the success or not of that progress. Barriers to success are explored. Strategies for overcoming those barriers are adopted. Ways you can help are identified. The delegatee is challenged where, however inadvertently, she is working against the aims of the project. Milestones are reassessed, with some kept, others dropped, and new ones agreed as necessary. She departs with new ideas, heightened clarity, and refreshed confidence and energy. So do you.

Feed back often, good and bad: Get into the habit of providing feedback regularly, so you both get used to it. You are on the same team: Check your feedback style and assumptions. Are you being adversarial or collaborative? Address the method, not the madness: Don’t use feedback to try and fix aspects of his character. That attacks a person’s sense of self-worth. Stick to tactics, knowledge, tips, and work routines. Disrupt patterns of generalities: Vague and evasive language can undermine feedback; learn to spot and challenge it. Offer suggestions instead of criticising: Instead of using the feedback sandwich to sweeten criticism, make a suggestion and offer two reasons why it might work. Everything is feedback: You’re always communicating, so take control and give the feedback you have chosen to give.

Like a coach, the delegator’s job is to raise the delegatee’s level of awareness of the delegatee’s own performance and potential, so that the delegatee can begin to take more responsibility for the factors limiting or enhancing that performance.

Three categories are proposed: Tasks, Processes, and Outcomes. The third category, Outcomes, bestows the most freedom on the delegator and, on the delegatee, the biggest opportunity to grow.

The experience led Dweck to develop the idea of two contrasting mindsets that shape our attitudes to our own and others’ abilities. People with a ‘growth mindset’, as she called it, like the positive pupils above, see their intellectual ability as something that can be developed through effort, learning and practice, while people with a ‘fixed mindset’ believe they were born with a certain amount of brains and talent and nothing they can do will change that. Growth mindset people are the more go-getting bunch. Faced with problems, they engage and persevere. Failure isn’t permanent, it’s success not just yet. Using electroencephalograms (EEGs) scientists found more brain activity relating to error adjustments among college students with a growth mindset than among their peers with a fixed mindset.7 Growth-minded people also showed better accuracy after mistakes.

Deep and deliberate delegation moves the focus away from your personal traits as a leader and onto what is more important: the relationships between you and your team.

Good delegation requires active participation from the delegator but not overbearing involvement in the delegated thing, which is why, in the beginning, good delegation does not make the delegator’s life easier, necessarily.

Another is regularly to measure and appreciate progress as the distance travelled from the starting point, which lifts morale, rather than solely against the desired end point, which deflates morale. The clever delegator instils confidence, too, by framing the thing to be delegated not as a test to pass or fail but as an exercise in capacity development: ‘Lessons will be learned, and we will get there in the end’ is liberating, while ‘If you can’t do this there is something wrong with you’ is debilitating.

Idea • Being leader of a team, department or organisation should not mean you are CPS (Chief Problem Solver). If you are, you are working one or two pay grades below what you were hired to do. Idea • Your real job is to conceive and articulate a vision for where your team, department or organisation should be heading, and, with help from your people, to work out a detailed roadmap (strategy) for how to get there. Reflection • Ask yourself and others what things you can do that will get your ‘ship’ moving toward the vision, and what among those things fall inside your Zone of Mastery.

Spend some time making a list of all the things you do in your role. Work from your formal job description, but make sure to include all the things you actually do, as well, from training new recruits, to organising away days, to setting strategy. Then arrange this catalogue of activities into four groups: Things you are incompetent at doing: The realm of stress and futility, you really should not be doing it. Things you are competent at, but don’t enjoy: You meet minimum standard levels, but others do it better, and it bores you. Things you’re quite good at, but have no passion for: From experience you can do it standing on your head, but it doesn’t fire you up. Things you excel at, and love doing: Here you are ‘in the zone’. It is the realm of Unique Ability, passion and maximum effectiveness. If you think of these four categories as concentric rings, the first is cold and distant, the Outer Ring Of Rank Incompetence, a place to avoid at all costs. Next in is the Ring Of Dreary Competence; you do not want to linger here for long, either. Getting warmer and closer-in is the Ring Of Passionless Skill, where many of us spend more time than we’d like. And in the middle is the Bullseye of Mastery.

This happens when people are allowed to derive three crucial things from work: a sense of autonomy; a sense of mastery; and a sense of purpose.

To get started there should be no more than five, judged as the most critical for this stage of the project.

Further reading: Challenging Coaching, by John Blakey and Ian Day (Nicholas Brealy Publishing, 2012)

Reflection • Think of a desirable but unrealistic outcome. Why exactly it is unrealistic? Whose comfort zones does it disrupt? Idea • Courageous goals have their own momentum. They force a change of scene, raise entirely new questions, and call new relationships into being. Tool • Use the Courageous Goal Starter Kit to get things moving: 1) Dream it, 2) Declare it, and 3) Get started. Tool • Make it sticky with SUCCES: Get more buy-in for your Courageous outcome by describing it using the principles defined by Chip and Dan Heath and their acronym, SUCCES – it should be 1) Simple, 2) Unexpected, 3) Concrete, 4) Credible, 5) Emotional, and 6) contain a Story.

Dweck believes that children’s mindsets are profoundly affected by how we praise them. What should be praised is not just success and signs of intelligence, but the application of the learning process – the effort, perseverance, strategizing, and resulting improvements. This fosters motivation and a sense for how success can be achieved. If we praise only successful results and other signs of intelligence, we may give the child a temporary confidence boost, but we may unwittingly be fostering a fixed mindset. The result is greater fragility, and a dependence on constant validation.