As a manager or leader you probably find yourself with a lot of competing demands on your time.  You might even be struggling to deliver on your key objectives.

Every manager and leader understands that they cannot possibly do everything on their own, yet many resist delegation.  In my experience part of the reason for this is that they have pre-conceived ideas about delegation.  Some of the common myths include:

1. It will take too long to explain it to someone else so it is quicker to do it myself
2. I have no one that I could trust enough to delegate such an important job to
3. I tried to delegate in the past but it did not work so I don’t think it will work in the future
4. If I delegate too much, my boss will wonder if they really need me and I might get made redundant
5. Delegation is for people who cannot handle a big portfolio of work by themselves
6. I don’t have the time to delegate with so much to do

All of these myths are just that.  Truth is if you want to prosper as a manager or leader, you need to be willing to delegate.  So what is stopping you delegating?

One of the great benefits of a team is the range of skills, knowledge, experience and personal attributes that they can draw on to address a problem or issue.  On the other hand, the full potential of this diverse range of expertise is often not fully exploited.  This might be due to one or more of the following factors:

• People don’t fully appreciate what others are good at

• People make assumptions about what people can or cannot do rather than finding out

• People think and maybe even believe that they are masters at everything

• People don’t like acknowledging that they are not great at some things for fear of losing face or worrying how it will change others perceptions of them

As the leader of the team your job is to make sure that you get each and every one of your team members performing at their optimal level, so take the time and make the effort to discover and exploit the strengths of your team members.

How often, when you ask someone what they want, they proceed to tell you what they don’t want.  I have been noticing this response more and more recently.  Knowing what you want professionally and personally is essential, no matter whether you are a small business, a major corporation or a manager of a small team. 

Imagine you stepped into a cab and the driver asked you where you wanted to go.  Would you reply, I don’t know, you choose?  Of course you would not.   So why do so many people adopt this approach to area like business, career, relationships, health, fitness and personal growth.  Setting a clear direction has a number of benefits:

• Gets you connected to your bigger vision of what you want to achieve and the impact that you want to have

• Acts as a reference point to support your decision making on a day to day basis.  Simply asking yourself the question, is this moving me closer to or further away from what I want will help you to target your energies

• Keeps you motivated when times are tough

So how can you start the process of setting a clear direction?

Establish Where You Are Now

Finding out where you are now is a vital first step.  You need to consider questions like:

• What’s working?

• What’s not working?

• What’s motivating?

• What’s de-motivating?

• What strategies are you deploying?

• Where are your strategies taking you?

This process can be done for you as an individual, as a team or even for a business as a whole.

Where Would You Like To Be?

Once you have got some clarity on where you are right now and the direction it is taking you in, you can start to create a vision of where you would like to be.  In creating a vision, some of the common problems we run into include:

• Aiming too low and not making it compelling enough

• Overly worrying about how we are going to do it

• Producing something that is out of line with our values

When starting on your vision, it is worth thinking about:

• What you want to create

• Why you want to create it

• What it will give you when you have achieved or partly achieved it

• How you will feel if you don’t start or don’t achieve

In our vision, it is all too easy to focus on things like:

• Financial benefits

• Status

• Materialistic things

While these are important, don’t forget about things like lifestyle.  For example, do you want lots of money and a life that consists of 80 hours a week of work, 56 for sleep and 34 for everything else?  There is no right or wrong, but consciously choosing is incredibly powerful.

Selecting Tactics

The tactics are those things that you will do to make your vision a reality.  In a business context they might include things like:

• Training and developing staff

• Raising finance

• Marketing

• Selling

• Developing technology

In a career context it might be things like:

• Taking a secondment, maybe overseas

• Working on developing a particular skill or attribute

• Self appraisal and feedback from others

• Researching related roles or even completely different roles

Choosing tactics gets you into action and action gets results.

Monitor and Adjust

Even when you have established where you are, where you want to get to and chosen your tactics, chances are that things will not always go quite as you expected. It is essential that you have a mechanism for:

• Monitoring your progress

• Adjusting and taking corrective action

At the end of the day, setting direction and achieving results is a relatively simple process.  The question is are you ready to make it happen?

When leading workshops, training or speaking about teams, I often get people to think about what the key characteristics are of the best teams.

Without exception, having a common goal is one of the first things that people tend to highlight. So why are goals seen as so powerful when it comes to team working?

Firstly a goal gives everyone a clear and specific outcome to aim for.  The team knows what is trying to deliver and has a clear direction of travel.

Secondly, delivering the goal, especially if it is going to make a big difference to a number of stakeholders becomes a huge desire for those in the team.  This desire drives the team on, even when things are tough.

Thirdly a common goal breaks down the barriers of which function or specialism people work in and shifts the attention to delivering the result.

We all know that teams have huge potential to deliver great results.  How has the existence or lack of a goal impacted on the results your team delivers?

The last few days in the UK have highlighted just how important it is to plan for the unexpected.  A significant snowfall has brought many parts of the country to a standstill and is estimated to be costing business significant losses.

As a leader you will have to deal with the unexpected, but how robust is your planning.  When was the last time that you for example sat down and considered:

• The most significant risks facing your business
• How you would respond if one or more of these risks was to materialise

Unexpected events like the heavy snowfall over the last few days provide a timely reminder of the importance of being ready for the unexpected things that come up from time to time.  So what have you found works well when preparing for the unexpected?