Dave Stitt Quotes

Good delegators, it emerges time and time again, are people who instil confidence and belief; who are organised; who communicate well; who let people get on with it; and who provide effective feedback.

Without effective goal-setting there can be no holding to account and, therefore, no accountability. If there is no accountability, feedback is meaningless. It will lack purpose and be arbitrary. At worst, it is the mere projection onto an employee of the boss’s own issues. So, deal with goal-setting and accountability first.

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.

Three criteria are put forward by O’Neill in assessing trustworthiness: competence, honesty and reliability.

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 win back time and unleash talent you have to delegate something substantial. You can tell if the delegated thing is substantial if: 1) it hurts a bit to give up; 2) it feels risky to let go; 3) it is stretching for the delegatee; 4) it makes you all a bit nervous; and 5) it constitutes a good chunk of your time, 20% for example, based on your Time Tracker results (see Chapter 3).

Your Unique Ability is the combination of talents, interests and capabilities that is unique to you. How do we recognise it? Four ways: when you are in the zone of your Unique Ability, 1) people admire you because the results are stunning; 2) you love doing it and time flies; 3) it gives you energy rather than sapping it; and 4) you get better at it all the time. Success, insisted Sullivan, comes to people who pay attention to their Unique Ability, define it, and start shedding responsibilities that fall outside it.

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.

Offering input only when problems arise may cause people to see you as unappreciative or petty,” observe the authors of Giving Effective Feedback (Harvard Business Review Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 2014).

The Specific Test goes like this: Somebody must do something he or she was not doing before. The ‘do’ is a good, ordinary verb that a child will understand. If you are not sure, find a child and ask him if he understands the verb. Doing the thing will have a tangible result, one that we want.

Focussing on progress instead of perfection builds confidence, which boosts our energy, stimulates lateral thinking, and helps us take necessary risks.

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.

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.

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.

The ones that are greediest and farthest from the bullseye represent the fields of activity that most urgently need to be delegated.