Jul
20
How to effectively delegate tasks…
Filed Under Team Leadership | 1 Comment
Effective leaders delegate tasks to others, this allows them to work of more important concerns and to help develop other people around them. However, the reality is that you can only delegate work, not responsibility, if it’s your accountability it remains your accountability no matter who does the work. This means that when you delegate a task, you need to make sure that you delegate in way that ensures you get the right outcome. David Maister has an great post on his blog on how to effectively delegate a task and provides the following pointers:
- The context of the assignment – ‘Please could you tell me what you are going to do with this when I get it done, tell me who is it for, and where does it fit with other things going on?’
- Deadline – When would you like it, and when is it really due?
- Scope – Would you like me to do the thorough job and take a little longer, or the quick and dirty version?
- Format – How would you like to see the output of my work presented? What would make your life easier?
- Time budget – Roughly how long would you expect this to take (so I can tell whether I’m on track or not?)
- Relative priority – What’s the importance of this task relative to the other things you have asked me to do?
- Available resources – Is there anything available to help me get the job done? For example, have we done one of these before?
- Success criteria – How will the work be judged? Is it more important to be fast, cheap or perfect?
- Monitoring and scheduled check points – Can we, please, schedule now a meeting, say, halfway through so I can show you what I’ve got and ensure that I’m on track for your needs?
- Understanding – can I just read back to you what you’ve asked me to do, to confirm that I got it down right?
- Concerns – before I get started can I just share with you any concerns about getting this done (e.g., other demands on my time) so that I don’t surprise you later?
This is a great way to delegate and ensure that you achieve the desired outcomes.
Technorati Tags: Management, Leadership, Delegation, Getting Things Done, GTD, Effectiveness
Jun
4
Great leaders surround themselves with great people. Lone ranger leadership is doomed to fail, there is no one great person that is going to transform an organisation it takes a strong team and a great leader. If you look at the life of anyone who has achieved success, such as Jack Welch, Bill gates and others, you’ll notice that they surround themselves with great people. But! It’s not that easy, the trick is to known what great looks like, "How do you know the great people when you see them?" An article by Peter Carbonara from Fast Company provides help for leaders looking to identify and select the right people for their team.
The proposition is undeniable: you can’t build a great company without great people. But how many companies are as rigorous about hiring as they comfortable evaluating job candidates as they are deciding on an investment proposal? The all-too-common reality, in far too many companies, is that hiring processes are poorly designed and shabbily executed.
Of course, making the commitment to hire great people raises an even more basic question: How do you know them when you see them? Over the last few years, a number of companies have asked themselves that question. They’ve analyzed what separates their winners from their losers, good hires from bad hires. These companies compete in a wide range of industries — from airlines to steel, computers to hotels — but they all arrived at the same answer: What people know is less important than who they are. Hiring, they believe, is not about finding people with the right experience. It’s about finding people with the right mind-set. These companies hire for attitude and train for skill.
The article proposes that by using the following four principles you can improve your chances of selecting the right person…..
- What You Know Changes, Who You Are Doesn’t - Popeye was right: "I y’am what I y’am." The most common — and fatal — hiring mistake is to find someone with the right skills but the wrong mind-set and hire them on the theory, "We can change ‘em." Davidson’s response? Forget it. "The single best predictor of future behavior is past behavior," he says. "Your personality is going to be essentially the same throughout your life." As evidence, he points to U.S. Air Force research on personality types that began in the 1950s. For decades, researchers tracked their subjects by observing their behavior and interviewing their families, friends, and colleagues. The conclusion? Basic personality traits did not change, Davidson says. "Introverts were introverts, extroverts were extroverts. The descriptions were constant."
- You Can’t Find What You’re Not Looking For - Bill Byham, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on hiring, is president and CEO of Pittsburgh-based Development Dimensions International (DDI) . He’s also the father of a hiring methodology that goes by many names ("Targeted Selection" is the most popular) but revolves around a simple idea: the best way to select people who’ll thrive in your company is to identify the personal characteristics of people who are already thriving and hire people just like them. In the Byham model, companies work to understand their star performers, identify their target behaviors and attitudes, and then develop interview questions to find people with those attributes.
- The Best Way to Evaluate People is to Watch Them Work - A few companies take this rule literally — none more so than steelmaking giant Nucor. In many ways, Nucor is to steel what Southwest is to airlines: innovative, fast-moving, eager to break the rules. One of Nucor’s best sources of new steelworkers are the construction workers who build its plants. Managers monitor their construction sites, look for plumbers and electricians who demonstrate the work habits they value, and then hire them. At Nucor, the dirty and dangerous task of building a steel mill is one long interview for jobs running it.
- You Can’t Hire People Who Don’t Apply - Companies that take hiring seriously also take recruiting seriously….. Companies that hire smart usually start their recruiting efforts close to home — with their own people. SGI’s Lane estimates that 65% of his company’s new hires began as referrals from current employees. It makes sense: it takes a certain kind of person to thrive at SGI, and those people tend to spend time (personally and professionally) with people like themselves.
One of the central tasks of leaders is the selection and development of people and teams. Leaders tend to recruit too hastily and take too long to remove those who are under-performing. The key to recruiting great people it to be clear about what you’re looking for in others. What are the characteristics of people who succeed in your team? Do you actively look for those characteristics in the people you’re looking to hire?
Technorati Tags: Teamwork, Selection, Talent, Recruitment, Leadership, Teams, People, Management, Business
May
26
How to Build a Great Team
Filed Under Team Leadership | 1 Comment
The article “How to Build a Great Team” by Charlie Feld, provides a great overview of what it takes to build a great team. Charlie found that the “secret sauce” of great leaders are:
Character: Doing the Right Thing
My definition of character is …. what you do, not what you say. Not only the right thing from a business or economic aspect, but the right thing including social and philosophical dimensions…. People will rally around leaders who do the right things consistently. They know they can count on their leaders to be open and honest at every fork in the road and to take a stand regardless of the personal risk. When people feel their leaders are erratic, political or detached from them, they will become cynical. They will generally do their work but won’t be committed. Their trust can only be built over time, so don’t become discouraged if people take a “show me” attitude.
Leadership Development: The Most Important Task
The second competency required for great execution is developing the leadership skills of your team. Organizations are seldom led by a single person, no matter how charismatic. The team at the top determines the environment and the culture. The team decides what gets rewarded, punished, recognized and ignored. Although they don’t run all of the plays, they call the plays.
For CIOs, it’s important to remember that the team at the top represents and reflects your character and agenda. Regardless of what you say you believe, who you choose for your IT leadership team speaks more loudly. So choosing and developing your leadership team is the single most important competency of a leader. This is a time-consuming task. Many great leaders talk about spending up to one-third of their time on leadership development. Since no one is perfect, everyone needs help and coaching.
Developing leaders means that you can articulate the requirements in a clear and thoughtful way. Without a basic framework of leadership skills, it’s hard to evaluate and give people feedback-and without constructive feedback, most people will not change and grow.
Passion: The Organizational Energy Level
Passion for the job is hard to manufacture, but when present, it is contagious. Enthusiasm from a leader enables people to sustain themselves through demanding times. The energy level of an organization is set at the top.
Influence and Persuasion: Better than Power
Executives tend to think it is much easier and less time-consuming to just tell their direct reports what to do. Part of leadership, however, lies in spending time to explain a directive, in giving employees perspective and in helping them understand the “why” behind the direction. This is influence-the flip side of positional power. It is easy to rely on positional power and forget the usefulness of influencing skills.
Leaders have the responsibility of developing people and building teams. How are you doing? What percentage of your time do you spend developing the people around you?
“Develop everyone you touch.” - Robert Greenleaf
Technorati Tags: Team, Teams, Teamwork, Leadership, Management, Character, Development, Business, Passion
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