Practical Leadership: Delegate the right way

Delegation is a important aspect of Leadership, it also has a high chance of failure OR at best is done mediocrely without any innovation.

Some Leaders feel that if you just tell your reportee what to do, that is Delegating. Others feel that Delegating means micromanaging the engagement to death. But Delegating is more of a journey and less of a one time explanation.

The right way to Delegate for a Leader which has had a rather high rate of success is 

1) Check which of your reportees may be interested to get this task (eg: someone who wants in move to a management role in the future)

2) Explain the tasks related to the Delegated activity

3) Get the reportee introduced to the various stakeholders and inform the stakeholders of the delegation.

4) Show them how to do it once/couple of times as needed, yet encourage them to follow their own way / customize as needed.

5) Check in from time to time on Progress / solve any concerns. 

• Don't micromanage
• Frequently of checkin should be low to begin with and should reduce further as delegation activity matures.

6) Don't just give the task, give authority to perform the task.

7) Appreciate the reportee for taking up the task in a wider forum.

Practical Leadership: Take calculated risks

"Risk hai to Ishq hai"

How often do you see Manager's who are extremely risk averse.  I have had the chance to encounter many such Managers who were such risk averse that things would stay in status quo for years even though it would impact them and their teams every day.

But risk averse behavior is not just a behavior that is exhibited by individual's, I have seen entire organization's being risk averse. 

The culture of the organization is usually to blame. The reasons almost always were

1) If you get retaliated on for the risk you took that resulted in a failure.

2) Processes and Rules discourage any risk taking capability.

So what is the solution?

What you should do is to inculcate a culture of taking calculated risks and train / hire leader's who can not only take calculated risks but also get their reportees to take such risks.

Taking Risks is not bad till the time every possible problem it can bring in accounted for. Always have a plan in case things don't work out. 

Calculating Risk and taking them is not very difficult to work with if you follow these  simple steps

1) Research well on what you plan to do

2) Identify Stakeholder's and how it will impact them

3) Anticipate Mistakes 

4) Set Checkpoints and Goals to measure your changes the risk brings.

5) Be ready to course correct OR jump to an alternate Plan

6) Don't be afraid to cut your losses and revert from the Change

7) Learn from your successes and your failures

8) Repeat

and

Something that is not given its due importance but should be which is to "Learn from other people's mistakes"

and least I forget

Enjoy the benefits of the Risks you took when things go as planned.

FIN

Practical Leadership - ESI before CSI

ESI = Employee Satisfaction Index = How satisfied your employee is

CSI = Customer Satisfaction Index = How satisfied a customer is with your service / product

I had had the unique chance of working with Engineering as well as Support teams where CSI was fairly low as in the mid 20's or lower 30's. There were real issues that needed to be dealt with like

1) Processes too inefficient or too dependent on a single person / single team.

2) Lack of Product knowledge

3) Lack of support from Account Teams

4) Incorrectly set Customer expectations

5) Too little resources resulting in too much work

etc

but one area that would almost always get overlooked was how satisfied the Employee was.

The aspects that got invariably missed out were

Right fitment of the Role

Availability of the right resources

Right Mentors

Acting on Feedback from the team.

Conflict Management

Basic concerns about compensation and allowances

Quality of work (reducing monotonous work)

Good Leaders

Vision of the product

There were instances where despite a lot of changes teams would not go beyond 40% on the CSI score's consistently till the ESI aspects were taken care of. > 70% CSI was very much achievable in most cases after taking care of the ESI concerns.

Hence low CSI could very well be a symptom but the Root Cause could very well be low ESI. 

Moral of the Story: Fix the right problems to get the right results.

Coming Soon...

The Impossible Release

ESI before CSI

There is a 8086 processor in every modern x86/x64 processor

How to Delegate work

Practical Leadership - Care for your reportees

 I still remember once when my Leader called me up as I was driving down to office to tell me that there is a huge crowd of people below the office protesting (my office was next to the Slum Rehabilitation Office) a change in some bylaws; he told me drive down to a different parking spot away from this chaos.

He did not have to do this, he could have simply ignored to let me know and it was not much but it showed my Leader cared. This got deeply imprinted in my mind and today still serves as a reminder as to why I take care of my reportees.

Simple things matter; showing you care matters. 

Today if one of my reportees falls ill, I call up OR drop a message and ask how he/she is doing. If someone's close family member is not in the best of health I ask my reportee to take some time off to tend to their near and dear ones. Fancy gifts, an award from the Office front etc are important, and will act as a short term feel good factor for your reportee  but those will be forgotten. 

What you will be remembered for will be that you genuinely cared, showed them you are human and eventually that's all that matters.