Page 169 - Becoming a Successful Manager

160 BUILDING ON YOUR FOUNDATION

adept at delegating, your employees will feel safe and will be
receptive to taking on additional duties. This precept is at the
very heart of being a manager. You can’t do everything yourself,
and you shouldn’t try. Instead, you must motivate other people to
do things and to do them well.
This is easily said but sometimes a feat to pull off. Employees

may be overly accustomed to doing a specific job in a certain way;
giving them a new task or a new format for accomplishing that task
might require a change in methodology that is uncomfortable.
When you assign a task, you aren’t giving up responsibility for it
but rather allowing another to carry out the task instead of doing
it yourself. The trick is doing everything within your control to
help them meet or exceed your expectations of the results. A large
part of that lies in your ability to incent and support them as they
change and take risks. Once you have set up their environment for
success, your job is to observe, guide, and protect the risk takers.

Delegation in Action

Here’s an instructive account of how, by delegating well, an author-
ity fi gure allowed someone he valued and trusted to take a reason-
able risk. Although that someone was his daughter, the principles
he employed in this personal situation also apply to business.
Larry’s 16-year-old daughter, Susan, had just passed her driv-
er’s test and received her license. Several weeks later, the family
decided to take a short road trip to visit relatives in a neighboring
state. Susan asked if she could plan the trip and, of course, do the
driving. After Larry and his wife gave their permission, Susan went
to work on her plan. She got out the maps, checked the possible
routes, and fi nally settled on the best (fastest) option. Larry could
have told her what it was, but this was her trip and her plan.