TIME MANAGEMENT: DELEGATION MODULE 2

• Introduction
• Objectives
• Criterion Test
• Delegation Exercise
• Guidelines to Effective Delegation
• Who's Got the Monkey

INTRODUCTION

Delegation, whether to subordinates, co-workers, or to anyone else for that matter is an important time saving tool.

In the Module "Solving Timewasters" you learned to identify time wasters and reduce or eliminate many of them. This Module takes this one step further by showing you how you can delegate those things that others can do, and reserve to yourself those things only you can do.

OBJECTIVE

1. Given a "Daily Time Log" completed with activities you perform;

1. select those tasks that can be delegated to someone responsible to do such tasks; and
2. identify the person in his/her job situation to whom such tasks can be delegated.

CRITERION TEST

Using any reference material required, do the following:

1. Complete the delegation self-evaluation questionnaires
   
2. Summarize in a paragraph how you will improve your managerial effectiveness by means of delegation. (Summarize the findings of the form).

Delegation

When you have completed this module, you will have analyzed your own state of delegation, and will likely discover that you can save time by increasing the amount of work and responsibility that you delegate, without losing the control you require to do your job.

Who's In Command?

What Delegation Means To The Manager:

The manager who delegates is interested primarily in results, and permits his subordinates to work out the details for themselves. He sets goals, tells his subordinates what he wants accomplished, fixes the limits within which they can work and lets them decide how to achieve these goals. He explains why he wants things done and points out how the subordinate's contribution fits into the overall plan. He gives the subordinate the maximum freedom he can handle consistent with his ability and the aims of the organization.

To The Employee:

Even if you have no subordinates, as such, you still may be faced with many tasks that don't have to be done by anyone, or things that can be done by someone else. Time is just as valuable to the employee as to the manager, therefore this module applies equally to anyone, regardless of their position in an organization.

Learning to Delegate

The first problem in delegation is what to delegate since each job has certain residual duties that the jobholder himself must perform. There may also be tasks too difficult, confidential or delicate to be turned over to someone else. If you have people working for you, you should delegate less important activities to give yourself additional time to devote to more important responsibilities. Before you can decide upon what to delegate, you should examine your job and ask yourself the negative question:

"What am I doing now that does not need to be done by anyone?"

No part of the organization is free from its history. The wisdom of hindsight may pinpoint work that makes little contribution later on to organizational objectives owing to changing priorities. The issue to be faced here is whether the Force needs that particular task done at all.

The second question that should be asked during the job-pruning stage is:

"What could be handled as well by others?"

Because most people tend to exaggerate their own importance, they frequently fail to let go of what they're doing. But would their own importance not be considerably greater if their personal time was focussed on the activities that could not be done by others?

Delegation of tasks is an elementary art of time management, it is generally not well practiced. In fact, failure to do is a principle reason for ineffective time management. So review what you're doing and delegate those jobs that should be done by people who would be best able to do them. This will afford you more time to do what you should be doing.

How Does Delegation Work

To demonstrate. the following exercise is presented. The exercise demonstrates how our hypothetical employee completed the exercise. After each section of the exercise, you will be given the opportunity to complete each section using your job as a reference point.

DELEGATION EXERCISE - MANAGING TIME

List ten activities that take from l5 minutes to l2 hours per week of your time as the manager of your group.

• Indicate an estimate of total weekly time for each activity.
• Indicate whether you can delegate -

• all of activity
• none of activity
• part of activity

Determine total number of hours spent on activity each week.

ACTIVITY	TIME SPENT	DELEGATE
		All	None	Partly
l. Answering Telephones	4 hours	.	.
2. Writing Reports	10 hours	.	.
3. Reading Mail	4 hours	.		.
4. Making Decisions on Task Priority	6 hours	.		.
5. Interviewing Job Applicants	5 hours	.	.
6. Reading and Approving Reports	8 hours	.	.
7. Attending Meetings	2 hours	.	.
8. Assist Staff Members	2 hours	.	.
9. Report Progress to Boss	1 hour	.		.
.l0. Inventory Material and Facilities	3 hours		.	.
TOTAL	45 hours	.

Using the following blank form designed to indicate which activities you perform, the time spent, and those activities you may be able to delegate, fill it in using your job activities as the basis for this exercise.

List ten activities that take from l5 minutes to l2 hours per week of your time as the manager of your group.

• Indicate an estimate of total weekly time for each activity.
• Indicate whether you can delegate

• all of activity
• none of activity
• part of activity

Determine total number of hours spent on activity each week.

1. List names of the members of your work team and others to whom you can delegate work (include your secretary).
   
2. Delegate all of the tasks that they can do for you. Indicate, under each person, the extent of delegation possible to each person by listing the time you will save having them to do this work.
   
3. Determine total time saved for each activity.
   
4. Determine total time saved by adding figures in the last column.

Have you listed anything that does not need to be done by anyone?

1. List names of the members of your work team and others to whom you can delegate work (include your secretary).
   
2. Delegate all of the tasks that they can do for you. Indicate, under each person, the extent of delegation possible to each person by listing the time you will save having them to do this work.
   
3. Determine total time saved for each activity.
   
4. Determine total time saved by adding figures in the last column.

Have you listed anything that does not need to be done by anyone?

To determine amount of time you will save in one week by effective delegation, refer to and fill in the following:

• Development of new projects
• Creative thinking
• Increasing production
• etc.

What you have just seen is an example of how a typical week of work has been analyzed and reduced through the use of the delegation process. You should now be prepared to apply this procedure to your work week in order to determine whether or not you are delegating effectively.

Now complete the following form to determine how much time you can save by delegation of selected tasks.

To determine amount of time you will save in one week by effective delegation, refer to and fill in the following:

To assist you in the actual process of delegation to your work team members, the following guidelines to delegation are presented.

GUIDELINES TO EFFECTIVE DELEGATION

1. Define Assignments to be Delegated

They should call for the same or similar skills. Specify the authority involved. Avoid overlaps and gaps.

Some bosses won't delegate because they enjoy the importance of being in on everything that goes on, and they feel they would lose some power or prestige if they turned over a part of the job to a subordinate. Some bosses have had unsuccessful experiences in delegating because they turned over authority without preparing the subordinate to handle it. Or they may have tried to delegate without having any standards by which to measure performance or any system of controls by which to get reports on how well the work was being done.

2. Set Standards of Performance so that people know what is expected of them.
   
3. Select the Person Carefully

You must take time to consider all factors involved before selecting the person to whom you will give the new job. Is he overloaded or underloaded? Will he accept it with enthusiasm? Does he have special talent that will give him a chance to be creative in doing the job? The supervisor must know if they fear criticism of mistakes and will thus run to the boss for decisions. Assignments can be designed and delegated to overcome these hangups.

4. Maintain Open Lines of Communications

Since the supervisor does not delegate all authority, or abdicate his responsibility, his delegation should provide for adequate information and feedback. Because plans change and decisions must be made in the light of changing conditions delegations tend to be fluid and to be given meaning in the light of such changes. This means that there should be a free flow of information between supervisor and subordinate so that the subordinate has information with which to make decisions and to interpret properly the authority delegated to him. Communication also serves to allow the subordinate to put forward his ideas. Receptiveness on the part of the manager is the key and he should welcome and compliment ingenuity.

5. Establish Proper Controls

It is important that you make yourself available soon after delegating to answer any questions. Make corrections, compliment the employee where possible, and satisfy yourself that everything has been properly co-ordinated. As long as you are responsible, you must know how things are going, hence the need for adequate feedback. But controls must not interfere with delegation, they must be relatively broad and designed to show deviations from plans rather than detailed actions of subordinates. Don't take away delegated authority at the first sign of failure. Instead, both the supervisor and the subordinate should learn from the experience. Coaching techniques should be used to develop more capable employees.

6. Reward Effective Delegation and Successful Assumption of Authority

It is seldom sufficient to suggest that authority be delegated, or even to order that this be done. Managers should ever be watchful for means of rewarding both effective delegation and effective assumption of authority. This granting of greater authority and prestige -- both in a given position and in promotion to a higher position -- is often the most effective, but much smaller rewards such as being complimented on a job well done, are welcomed.

7. Make Use of the Rule of Exception so that only those problems outside the subordinate's authority are referred to you for a decision and that you, in turn, refer problems higher up in the organization only when you do not have the authority to make the decision.
   
8. Flow of Accountability

A supervisor who delegates authority, does not by that act alone become effective. He must hold his subordinates accountable. Without the requirements of accountability, the organization loses at least two essential elements to any successful administration: determination and measurement of results and adequate motivation with the resulting quality performance on the part of the subordinate.

Conclusion

Delegation, on-the-job training and development go hand in hand. They both imply trust by giving other people's ideas a chance. A subordinate's decision doesn't have to be exactly what yours might have been. You don't possess all of the good ideas, so welcome and reward ingenuity. Making delegation work is a joint responsibility. Some employees get trapped in the "I can do it better myself" fallacy. Even if a supervisor can do a better job than anyone else (which is not true quite so often as he thinks it is), he must nevertheless reconcile himself to turning the job over to someone else whose performance will be "satisfactory". The choice the employee must make is not between the quality of his work and that of his subordinate; rather, he should weigh the advantages of higher-level performance if he does the work himself against the benefit to the total operation if he devotes his attention to the planning and supervision that only he can undertake.

You have now completed this module. You should be more aware of the amount of time that proper delegation can save you, the manager, each week.

WHO'S GOT THE MONKEY

Why is it that managers are typically running out of time while their subordinates are typically running out of work? In this article, we shall explore the meaning of management time as it relates to the interaction between the manager and his boss, his own peers, and his subordinates.

Specifically, we shall deal with three different kinds of management time:

Boss-imposed time - to accomplish those activities which the boss requires and which the manager cannot disregard without direct and swift penalty.

System-imposed time - to accommodate those requests to the manager for active support from his peers. This assistance must also be provided lest there be penalties, though not always direct or swift.

Self-imposed time - to do those things which the manager originates or agrees to do himself. A certain portion of this kind of time, however, will be taken by his subordinates and is called "subordinate-imposed time". The remaining portion will be his own and is called "discretionary time". Self-imposed time is not subject to penalty since neither the boss nor the system can discipline the manager for not doing what they did not know he had intended to do in the first place.

The management of time necessitates that the manager get control over the timing and content of what he does. Since what the boss and the system impose on him are backed up by penalty, he cannot tamper with those requirements. Thus his self-imposed time becomes his major area of concern.

The manager's strategy is therefore to increase the "discretionary" component of his self-imposed time by minimizing or doing away with the "subordinate" component. He will then use the added increment to get better control over his boss-imposed and system-imposed activities. Most managers spend much more subordinate-imposed time than they even faintly realize. hence we shall use a monkey-on-the back analogy to examine how subordinate-imposed time comes into being and what the manager can do about it.

Where is the Monkey?

Let us imagine that a manager is walking down the hall and that he notices one of his subordinates, Mr. A, coming up the hallway. When they are abreast of one another, Mr. A. greets the manager with, "Good morning. By the way, we've got a problem. You see..." As Mr. A. continues, the manager recognizes in this problem the same two characteristics common to all the problems his subordinates gratuitously bring to his attention. Namely, the manager knows (a) enough to get involved, but (b) not enough to make the on-the-spot decision expected of him. Eventually, the manager says, "So glad you brought this up. I'm in a rush right now. Meanwhile, let me think about it and I'll let you know". Then he and Mr. A. part company.

Let us analyze what has just happened. Before the two of them met, on whose back was the "monkey"? The subordinate's. After they parted, on whose back was it? The manager's. Subordinate-imposed time begins the moment a monkey successfully executes a leap from the back of a subordinate to the back of his superior and does not end until the monkey is returned to its proper owner for care and feeding. In accepting the monkey, the manager has voluntarily assumed a position subordinate to his subordinate. This is, he has allowed Mr. A to make him his subordinate by doing two things a subordinate is generally expected to do for his boss -- the manager has accepted a responsibility from his subordinate, and the manager has promised him a progress report.

The subordinate, to make sure the manager does not miss this point, will later stick his head in the manager's office and cheerily query, "How's it coming?" (This is called "supervision")

Or let us imagine again, in concluding a working conference with another subordinate, Mr. B, the manager's parting words are, "Fine. Send me a memo on that."

Let us analyze this one. The monkey is now on the subordinate's back because the next move is his, but it is poised for a leap. Watch that monkey. Mr. B dutifully writes the requested memo and drops it in his outbasket. Shortly thereafter, the manager plucks it from his in-basket and reads it. Whose move is it now? The manager's. If he does not make that move soon, he will get a follow-up memo from the subordinate (this is another form of supervision). The longer the manager delays, the more frustrated the subordinate will become (he'll be "spinning his wheels") and the more guilty the manager will feel (his backlog of subordinate-imposed time will be mounting).

Or suppose once again that at a meeting with a third subordinate, Mr. C, the manager agrees to provide all the necessary backing for a public relations proposal he has just asked Mr. C to develop. The manager's parting words to him are, "Just let me know how I can help."

Now let us analyze this. Here the monkey is initially on the subordinate's back. But for how long? Mr. C realizes that he cannot let the manager "know" until his proposal has the manager's approval. And from experience, he also realizes that his proposal will likely be sitting in the manager's briefcase for weeks waiting for him to eventually get to it. Who's really got the monkey? Who will be checking up on whom? Wheelspinning and bottlenecking are on their way again.

A fourth subordinate, Mr. D, has just been transferred from another part of the company in order to launch and eventually manage a newly created business venture. The manager has told him that they should get together soon to hammer out a set of objectives for his new job, and that "I will draw up an initial draft for discussion with you."

Let us analyze this one, too. The subordinate has the new job (by formal assignment) and the full responsibility (by formal delegation), but the manager has the next move. Until he makes it, he will have the monkey and the subordinate will be immobilized.

Why does it all happen? Because in each instance the manager and the subordinate assume at the outset, wittingly or unwittingly, that the matter under consideration is a joint problem. The monkey in each case begins its career astride both their backs. All it has to do now is move the wrong leg, and -- presto -- the subordinate disappears. The manager is thus left with another acquisition to his menagerie. Of course, monkeys can be trained not to move the wrong leg. But it is easier to prevent them from straddling backs in the first place.

Who is Working for Whom?

To make what follows more credible, let us suppose that these same four subordinates are so thoughtful and considerate of the manager's time that they are at pains to allow no more than three monkeys to leap from each of their backs to his in any one day. In a five-day week, the manager will have picked up 60 screaming monkeys -- far too many to do anything about individually. So he spends the subordinate-imposed time juggling his "priorities".

Late Friday afternoon, the manager is in his office with the door closed for privacy in order to contemplate the situation, while his subordinates are waiting outside to get a last chance before the weekend to remind him that he will have to "fish or cut bait." Imagine what they are saying to each other about the manager as they wait: "What a bottleneck. He just can't make up his mind. How anyone ever got that high up in our company without being able to make a decision we'll never know."

Worst of all, the reason the manager cannot make any of these "next moves" is that his time is almost entirely eaten up in meeting his own boss-imposed and system-imposed requirements. To get control of these, he needs discretionary time that is in turn denied him when he is preoccupied with all these monkeys. The manager is caught in a vicious circle.

But time is a-wasting (an understatement). The manager calls his secretary on the intercom and instructs her to tell his subordinates that he will be unavailable to see them until Monday morning. At 7:00 P.M., he drives home, intending with firm resolve to return to the office tomorrow to get caught up over the weekend. He returns bright and early the next day only to see, on the nearest green of the golf course across from his office window, a foursome. Guess who?

That does it. He now knows who is really working for whom. Moreover, he now sees that if he actually accomplishes during this weekend what he came to accomplish, his subordinates' morale will go up so sharply that they will each raise the limit on the number of monkeys they will let jump from their backs to his. In short, he now sees, with the clarity of a revelation on a mountaintop, that the more he gets caught up, the more he will fall behind.

He leaves the office with the speed of a man running away from a plague. His plan? To get caught up on something else he hasn't had time for in years: a weekend with his family. (This is one of the many varieties of discretionary time.)

Sunday night he enjoys ten hours of sweet, untroubled slumber, because he has clear cut plans for Monday. He is going to get rid of his subordinate-imposed time. In exchange, he will get an equal amount of discretionary time, part of which he will spend with his subordinates to see that they learn the difficult but rewarding managerial art called, "The Care and Feeding of Monkeys".

The manager will also have plenty of discretionary time left over for getting control of the timing and content not only of his boss-imposed time but of his system-imposed time as well. All of this may take months, but compared with the way things have been, the rewards will be enormous. His ultimate objective is to manage his management time.

Getting Rid of the Monkeys

The manager returns to the office Monday morning just late enough to permit his four subordinates to collect in his outer office waiting to see him about their monkeys. He calls them in, one by one. The purpose of each interview is to take a monkey, place it on the desk between them, and figure out together how the next move might conceivably be the subordinate's

For certain monkeys, this will take some doing. The subordinate's next move may be so elusive that the manager may decide -- just for now -- merely to let the monkey sleep on the subordinate's back overnight and have him return with it at an appointed time the next morning to continue the joint quest for a more substantive move by the subordinate. (Monkeys sleep just as soundly overnight on subordinates' backs as on superiors'.)

As each subordinate leaves the office, the manager is rewarded by the sight of a monkey leaving his office on the subordinate's back. For the next 24 hours, the subordinate will not be waiting for the manager; instead, the manager will be waiting for the subordinate.

Later, as if to remind himself there is no law against his engaging in a constructive exercise in the interim, the manager strolls by the subordinate's office, sticks his head in the door, and cheerily asks, "How's it coming?" (The time consumed in doing this is discretionary for the manager and boss-imposed for the subordinate.)

When the subordinate (with the monkey on his back) and the manager meet at the appointed hour the next day, the manager explains the ground rules in words to this effect:

"At no time while I am helping you with this or any other problem will your problem become my

problem. The instant your problem becomes mine, you will no longer have a problem. I cannot help a man who hasn't got a problem. When this meeting is over, the problem will leave this office exactly the way it came in -- on your back. You may ask my help at any appointed time, and we will make a joint determination of what the next move will be and which of us will make it.In those rare instances where the next move turns out to be mine, you and I will determine it together. I will not make any move alone."

The manager follows this same line of thought with each subordinate until at about ll:00 A.M. He realizes that he has no need to shut his door. His monkeys are gone. They will return -- but by appointment only. His appointment calendar will assure this.

Transferring the Initiative

What we have been driving at in this monkey-on-the-back analogy is to transfer initiative from manager to subordinate and keep it there. We have tried to highlight a truism as obvious as it is subtle.

Namely, before a manager can develop initiative in his subordinates, he must see to it that they have the initiative. Once he takes it back, they will no longer have it and he can kiss his discretionary time good-bye. It will all revert to subordinate-imposed time.

Nor can both manager and subordinate effectively have the same initiative at the same time. The opener, "Boss, we've got a problem," implies this duality and represents, as noted earlier, a monkey astride two backs, which is a very bad way to start a monkey on its career. Let us, therefore, take a few moments to examine what we prefer to call "The Anatomy of Managerial Initiative".

There are five degrees of initiative that the manager can exercise in relation to the boss and to the system:

1. wait until told (lowest initiative);
   
2. ask what to do;
   
3. recommend then take resulting action;
   
4. act , but advise at once; and
   
5. act on own, then routinely report (highest initiative).

Clearly, the manager should be professional enough to indulge himself in initiatives l and 2 in relation either to the boss or to the system. A manager who uses initiative l has no control over either the timing or content of his boss-imposed or system-imposed time. He thereby forfeits any right to complain about what he is told to do or when he is told to do it. The manager who uses initiative 2 has control over the timing but not over the content. Initiatives 3, 4 and 5 leave the manager in control of both, with the greatest control being at level 5.

The manager's job, in relation to his subordinates' initiatives, is twofold; first, to outlaw the use of initiatives l and 2, thus giving his subordinates no choice but to learn and master "Completed Staff Work"; then, to see that for each problem leaving his office there is an agreed-upon level of initiative assigned to it, in addition to the agreed-upon time and place of the next manager-subordinate conference. The latter should be duly noted on the manager's appointment calendar.

Care and Feeding of Monkeys

In order to further clarify our analogy between the monkey-on-the-back and the well-known processes of assigning and controlling, we shall refer briefly to the manager's appointment schedule, which calls for five hard and fast rules governing the "Care and Feeding of Monkeys" (violations of these rules will cost discretionary time):

Rule l - Monkeys should be fed or shot. Otherwise, they will starve to death and the manager will waste valuable time on postmortems or attempted resurrections.

Rule 2 - The monkey population should be kept below the maximum number the manager has time to feed. His subordinates will find time to work as many monkeys as he finds time to feed, but no more. It shouldn't take more than 5 to l5 minutes to feed a properly prepared monkey.

Rule 3 - Monkeys should be fed by appointment only. The manager should not have to be hunting down starving monkeys and feeding them on a catch-as-catch can basis.

Rule 4 - Monkeys should be fed face to face or by telephone, but never by mail. (If by mail, the next move will be the manager's -- remember?) Documentation may add to the feeding process, but it cannot take the place of feeding.

Rule 5 - Every monkey should have an assigned "next feeding time" and "degree of initiative". They may be revised at any time by mutual consent, but never allowed to become vague or indefinite. Otherwise, the monkey will either starve to death or wind up on the manager's back.

Concluding Note

"Get control over the timing and content of what you do" is appropriate advice for managing time. The first order of business is for the manager to enlarge his discretionary time by eliminating subordinate-imposed time. The second is for him to use a portion of his new-found discretionary time to see to it that each of his subordinates possess the initiative without which he cannot exercise initiative, and then to see to it that this initiative is in fact taken. The third is for him to use another portion of his increased discretionary time to get and keep control of the timing and content of both boss-imposed and system-imposed time.

The result of all this is that the manager will increase his leverage, which will in turn enable him to multiply, without theoretical limit, the value of each hour that he spends in managing management time.

The woods are full of them.

This humorous article is based on the simple fact that most managers do work which should be delegated. You as a manager probably fall into this trap as well.

You have completed Module 2 - Click Here to go to Module 3

© GRC-RCMP
ecdp1130.doc
July 21, 1998