days many of us grapple, at all ages, to understand what this alone means to our online persona: How we appear to everyone in our world; friends, family, our children and their grandchildren, their teachers and lecturers, our employers, colleagues, suppliers and clients is increasingly something to think about. And we have a very clear and present need to address what this means for each of us. As an entrepreneurial middle-aged female with pre-teen children, I have both a business and personal need to understand these technological impacts, but I am not a ‘techy’: I find it more a necessary evil than a welcome invasion. That said, I embrace the benefits into my life without thinking about them – instant messaging, online diary and document access, indulgent voyeurism, music and movies on the move and so on. My chances of being ‘papped’ in a compromising Friday night position by a ‘friend’ who then plasters the pics all over the latest social media platform are mercifully limited (though not entirely over!); however, management of these risks for our children are highly prevalent and relevant. The benefits and damage – even to the point of suicide – are extreme and real and in large part we all understand the need to learn to deal with it.
More importantly, though, with regards to this book, we need to understand what, sometimes subtle, impacts this new, modern, technology-driven world has on delegation – how we delegate, how often, what form it takes and how effective it is. These impacts are not just the preserve of technology, though its existence influences the other key factors of gender and (slowly) increasing equality between the sexes and the influence of culture on this.
If we look again at the post-war period, we will see the stereotype of a white-collar male worker making his way up the corporate ladder and the point when he would be awarded the ‘office wife’. This would be a benefit both for him and for his real-life wife, as the new employee would be able to do more personal tasks for their boss – such as picking up the dry-cleaning, making hair and dental appointments – that normally fell to the boss's housewife. This was the social, status and professional reward for achieving a certain level of management.
These days, where the equivalent of the ‘office wife’ exists in a less frequent/more likely to be shared scenario and with the advent of greater equality, greater expectations of women's performance and career ambitions in the workplace, the delegation relationship is often (but not yet always) very different.
Culturally, we live in a more equal society where the media has helped to shape our views of those in positions of so-called power. Celebrities, royals and politicians are regularly featured and exposed in publications and online; in fact as social media enables us to instantly enter almost anyone's life, a degree of deference has almost certainly been lost at all levels of society.
And so delegation, in part, becomes a choice not just for the superior, to draw on the Oxford English Dictionary definition and to return us to the original point, but also for the junior. It is less an expected part of one's lot and more an acceptable part of one's role. That it is acceptable also means it can be deemed unacceptable and this, to my mind, defines the art of delegation or, more precisely, the verb ‘to delegate’, as a skill that involves reducing one's own workload by handing it over to another party (or software) application who (that) agrees to execute an agreed list of actions to an agreed standard within an agreed time.
Later, we will apply this thinking to delegation in scenarios other than the workplace and examine the multi-directional and multi-media capability of delegation in the home and in a political landscape as well as looking more deeply at the upwards and sideways manifestations of delegation.
The Gift of Time is accompanied by an online programme that offers practical help, activities and accountability for action.3
2
THE BENEFITS OF DELEGATION
There are multiple benefactors of successful or even simply effective delegation when it is an integral part of a company's operational culture.
We will address the financial benefits which apply to business owners, or those responsible and directly able to influence company growth, later; but in the meantime, what about everyone and everything else? Where are the benefits for them and what do they look like, and how – most importantly – can this be measured? As well as what I term ‘soft benefits’, which relate to how people feel in their work and in their life, there are also ‘hard benefits’, which can directly transcribe into financial improvement. It's a (somewhat sad) fact of life that money talks. In terms of adopting a new way of working (i.e. delegating more and the encouragement to do so in a corporate environment), there has to be a clear benefit to the organization, something more than ‘hope value’. The prospect of generating an increase of cold hard cash is always a good motivator, and therein lies the importance of the value of delegation in financial terms.
Whatever the varied benefits of delegation, there is one common denominator which results from effective delegation: time. By virtue of handing over workload or tasks, the delegator first gets his or her time back. This is the benefit of delegation. In truth, it is the only benefit of delegation to the delegator, what then transpires may or may not be a beneficial use of that time, but time in itself provides the benefit of choice.
Clearly, if one operates as a business owner or at the top of an organization and with limited supervision, the choice of what to do with time freed up is arguably greater. If the ‘why’ which motivates the delegation in the first place is clear, agreed and achievable then the benefits become more recognizable and tangible as they manifest. If the ‘why’ is not clear – and we will tackle this in greater depth as part of the process of delegation – then time can easily be wasted, and we are all capable of that.
If delegation in its strictest sense is passing on work to someone else and if the immediate and most obvious result of that is an unfilled gap in time, let's look at where that could lead in the following diagram (Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1 Delegation benefits map.
If we back-pedal a little, we can start at home with the young. The purpose of a parent is to make themselves redundant. There is more on this – with commentary from Elizabeth O'Shea, a renowned parenting coach – in Chapter 14. In achieving their own redundancy, parents (and clearly within this term I include any form of carer) produce young adults, capable, independent and equipped, insofar as they can be, to take on the world of adulthood.
The result, of course, will be happier, more independent children who know that part of their role is to pass on this knowledge to future generations.
And if we start to achieve ‘redundancy’ at work, we will create a rolling production line of passing back the workload, tasks and required outcomes, freeing up time for us to develop, grow and find new ways of achieving more, and being more fulfilled.
There are many routes and stakeholders and there are many motivating reasons for making oneself redundant; retirement, for example, is most successfully achieved for both the individual and the organization if a successor who picks up the workload and carries forth the legacy of the retiree is put into place. The retiree is free to retire because he or she is effectively redundant, by design of course.
Similarly, an employee leaving a role or an organization is a fact of life and a fact of a successful career. Just as in the case of our retiree, leaving a role is much more successfully achieved if the role leaver has been able to achieve their own ‘redundancy’ through the appointment and training of a successor.
Great delegation creates jobs at the back end of the production line and development, improvement and breakthroughs at the front line. One can't possibly do all that one already does and then add in more in order to improve or progress.
The ability to delegate with the intention of making the initial job description as redundant as possible
• creates employment, directly and virtually
• means flexible working and new self-employment opportunities for otherwise ‘unemployable’ people4
•