Are you a leader? Are you in charge of a team in your company or organisation? Then you might know these management strategies: Top Down, Down-up, Management by exception and so on. And you will probably have heard that a good manager delegates tasks. It’s good for the company if a leading person doesn’t do everything on his own. Why? Because if you do so you won’t let information flow, knowledge and experience concentrates in one person, your time will be occupied and is not available for strategical thoughts and your staff can not grow. So that’s why you should let your workers do the things that need to be done. And of course give them feedback and allow them to fail. This is what management coaches say. I say: That’s crap. If you want work to be cultivated (and not be done), if you see your workers as subordinates (and not as highly gifted human beings), if you want your company to run as usual (and not as an innovative fun organisation), then you should stick to the delegating philosophy. But if you really want to create something real fun und healthy then you should not base your time in delegating. The art of leading the company of the future doesn’t lie in the way how you get things done, the art lies in creating an atmosphere in which we can creatively develop new solutions. And according to the things that you are supposed to delegate to others: Do them, but do it in a way, that the work is really gone, not just done.
For example: If you feel exhausted because you have to doublecheck powerpoint slides which your team has prepared for you and you go crazy about details (orthographic issues or Corporate Design failures), what will you do? There are two possibilities: Correct the failures on your own or delegate it to subordinates. But there is a third way. And this is my recommendation: If this form of presentation eats so much energy and causes so much work, get rid off the presentation. Talk to your team and tell them what you want to do and then create a solution altogether. And allow your team and yourself to think out of the box and leave the initial tracks. Probably you will come to the conclusion that you should not present but someone else in the team, or you will come to the point that the whole task is somehow not up-to-date anymore. And if you really want to be super innovative: Allow yourself and the team to rethink the business model of your whole unit or company. This hurts and will cause a lot of stress, but this is the reason, why apple can invent iTunes (and not Virgin) and why Google can invent the automatically driving car (and not Daimler).
This is what I do when I come visiting a foreign company: I make the Coffee machine test. That means I look at the cleaning plan of the coffee machine. Everybody needs to drink coffee but nobody wants to clean it up (must be done everyday). In most cases you will realize the following: The higher the wages the less these workers will clean up the coffee machine. There is a similar phenomenon in customer relationship. The higher the wage the more distance the workers have to the customers and the product (think of cashiers, storage workers and shop assistants, who have more contact to customer and product than marketing managers or shop managers, but get the lowest wages). In most cases it’s the intern who has to do the shitty jobs. I once asked my boss, why he doesn’t clean up the coffee machine. He explained to me that this would damage the company. It has something to do with our different wages. Half an hour of his time costs the company 5 times more than half an hour of an intern. Wow. What a logic. This would also mean that half an hour shitting in the toilet causes a damage to the company which is 5 times higher than a shitting session of an intern. Actually to make it fair, an intern should have the right to stay 5 times longer in the bathroom than a leading person. Or the best thing is: Delegate your shit sessions.
What I think will bring more fun than categorizing people in wages groups is creating an atmosphere without fear and pressure. And in my opinion in our world today it’s wrong to think that only the head of a unit can give tasks. A Leader should not give tasks or delegate tasks that your workers don’t understand. A good leader should built a common point from which on we all define the next steps together. Create a starting point, and not a finish line. And celebrate the starting point. Make it big, paint it colorful, dance! Create gates which stands for something. Like the arc de Triomphe in Paris which stands for victory or a Brandenburg Gate which represents Unification. Motivate your team to walk through this gate, but let them define the route and the finish line. Don’t delegate – make a gate!
Here you find more management tipps for the business as usual:
http://mobil.zeit.de/karriere/beruf/2012-09/chefsache-delegieren