How to delegate effectively: Strategies for success

Garreth Hanley:
This is INTHEBLACK, a leadership, strategy and business podcast brought to you by CPA Australia.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Welcome to CPA Australia's INTHEBLACK podcast. I'm Jacqueline Blondell, and today we are diving into the art of delegation. To help me out is Daniel Murray, author of The Empathy Gap, a handbook for business leaders who want to form stronger connections with the people they lead. After graduating with a mathematics degree, Daniel joined one of Australia's largest insurers. He continued navigating corporate culture at the Commonwealth Bank while undertaking an MBA. He is now a leadership coach and speaker. Welcome to INTHEBLACK's Career Hacks, Daniel.

Daniel Murray:
Thanks for having me.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Could you tell us why you think new managers find delegation so difficult?

Daniel Murray:
I think, Jackie, there's a bunch of reasons, and one of them is that we often... as we're new managers, we've stepped into a new leadership role because we were really good at doing the job, so we were really good at doing the work and we stepped into this new role and then we see work and we think, "Well, I'm good at doing that work, so instead of delegating, I'll just jump in and do the work myself and I'm really good at it. And so, it'll be helpful and people will think that's great and I'll be seen as the hero and that'll be all wonderful."

The problem, of course, is that when you jump in and do other people's work, they often get frustrated. We sometimes feel like we're being undermined as the people trying to actually get the work done. And the biggest problem I think is when we fail to delegate, we tell ourselves a story that we're the hero doing it for the good reasons, but actually we are neglecting doing the real work as leaders, which is coordinating and supporting our teams.

And so, it's one of these really tough challenges where we tell ourselves a story that soothes us and makes us feel good when we go to sleep at night that we're doing a wonderful thing, but actually we're doing a lot more harm through failing to delegate.

Jacqueline Blondell:
It does sound exhausting as well if you are managing the team and doing all their work for them. Is that something that technical types are guilty of? Accountants are very technical, for example, so they're often promoted because they're good at that particular aspect of the job i.e. running the finances in a particular area.

Daniel Murray:
Yeah, that's the challenge. Particularly when it's very technical and we see someone in our team who maybe doesn't have the level of expertise, knowledge, they don't have that sort of precision in the work that they do, and we sort of get to that junction, that fork in the road and think, "I can either invest a bit of time to help and support this person, but I'm really busy and I'm tired and I just want to get the work done and so I'll just jump in and do it."

And while it might be more efficient in this specific moment, in the long run, I'm just setting myself up for failure. I'm just setting the team up for failure and it creates a lot of that disappointment, and it becomes exhausting.

And again, I don't use the word too often, but it's a sense of martyrdom that "I'm here to save the day. I'm here to fix everything. It's all coming on my shoulders. I've got to keep doing more and more." And unfortunately, it really burns people out quickly when they get into that sort of resentment cycle of "I shouldn't be doing this, my team's not doing it well enough, but I have to do it because I'm the only one that can." It's a pretty vicious sort of story we tell ourselves.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Why are delegation skills an essential part of a leader's skill set?

Daniel Murray:
If we think about what leadership is, it's about coordinating and scaling the impact of a group of people. So if we think about you as an individual, you've got a certain capacity, capability, things you can do.

What we know is when we can get a group of people to be coordinated and focused and driven and committed around a single objective, the scaling impact can be incredible. A small group of people can do amazing things, and that's what leadership is really about. It's playing that role of helping to scale and grow the capabilities of a group.

And when we neglect to delegate effectively, when we create those sort of spaces of disorganisation and chaos, it creates an impact for that team being able to do that work effectively. And this is why you can see such divergence in the same number of people, or even you can see it where a certain team is desperate for more resources, they can't seem to get the work done, and we keep pouring more and more resources.

And then a smaller organisation that are better coordinated and better led, can do incredible things with less resources. And we also just scratch our heads and wonder why, and often it's that leadership component that's missing.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Is that when large projects can go awry, when the sort of hand is off the tiller in terms of managing and making sure that everyone is flowing with the correct message and know what they're supposed to do?

Daniel Murray:
Yeah, I mean it's essentially... if we think about running a team as we're trying to coordinate a large scale dance where everyone's going to have to change tack every now and then and coordinate and move and there's going to be issues and things get in the way and there's chaos. And so, even good planning at the start isn't enough to guide a project because things don't go the way we plan.

I was reflecting the other day, the Sydney Opera House, they'd budgeted... I think it was seven years and $4 million to build the Sydney Opera House. And it took them a decade longer and $105 million to build. Good plans, but of course, when things go wrong in the middle, it's your ability to adapt as a leader. And that's why it's not just coordinating, but it's being in with the team, having the pulse of the team, building relationships amongst team members to manage not just the logical parts, but some of the psychological parts as well.

Jacqueline Blondell:
From your experience as a consultant, a coach, can you give us some leadership delegation issues that you saw that you observed where things could have gone better?

Daniel Murray:
Look, there's millions, I think, and there's no perfect with this. It's always going to be sort of trying to improve. I think the biggest thing is communication. What we tend to do is we tend to think about things quite extensively. Sometimes even a group of leaders might sit in a room and think about things quite a lot. They research, they do a lot of work to strategize, build lovely PowerPoint texts with beautiful chevrons and graphs and charts.

And after all of this thinking process, we then go and tell people what they need to do. Now, those people we're talking to often have almost no knowledge of all of that stuff that you've been through and that you've developed and all those assumptions in your head and all those ideas you've packaged up, they don't get communicated very well.

And so a good example, I remember years and years ago I was working at a large strategy team and my manager at the time had said to me, "Oh, can you just pull together a piece around this new technology that one of our competitors was using?" So I went away, and this was quite young in my career, I was quite plucky. I thought, "I'll go get some graphs and charts and references." I did all of this work. I put together probably about eight or nine pages on this technology and where it came from and referenced it. It was just beautiful, and I was really proud.

When my manager came and said, "Hey, where's that info on the thing?" I said, "Oh, look, I've almost finished. Here's the draft." He said, "I just wanted half a page. I needed something to go and talk to the board about." And it was terrible for all of us. Everyone lost there, everyone failed. Everyone felt like we'd done the wrong thing. No one was happy and lots of work had gone on.

And again, when we delegate, it's not just about assuming the other person's going to know what you're talking about, it's about being really clear and creating a level of certainty for what needs to be done. So that clarity and certainty helps guide the activity that's going to take place next.

Jacqueline Blondell:
This probably brings us naturally to empathy. What kind of role does empathy play in the delegation process?

Daniel Murray:
It's a lot more than I think people think about. So unfortunately, what I think particularly analytical types, so our good friends, accountants, economists, I'm a mathematician, it's my undergraduate degree. And when I look at the way I like to think about some of those things, the first thing I think about is what's the process, the steps, the systems, the structure, what's all of the tangible pieces we need to put together? And they are absolutely all important.

What we tend to overlook are what are all the intangible drivers that exist for people? So how are they feeling about it? Do they believe in what we're trying to do? Are they bought into where we're heading with this? How are they feeling? Are they bringing their best self to work?

And particularly when we're delegating, if I've got a group of people, some of my team will tell me that they are absolutely up to the gums. They haven't got any more capacity. They're so busy. They couldn't possibly do any more work. And we know that that's not quite true and that we need to push them a little bit more. There are also people on our team who will say, "Yes." They'll be underwater, they'll be drowning. They'll have way too much on their plate. They'll already have bitten off way too much and they'll still say yes to us.

And this is a really important role for a leader to be able to work with people and almost save them from themselves sometimes, which is actually what is going on? How sustainable is this in the long run? Because that dynamic isn't just about whether we burn people out or not, it triggers one of the most important emotional responses in people, which is fairness. "You keep asking me to do things. Sure, I keep saying yes, but you should know that that's not fair. As a leader, you should know that."

And unfortunately, this is a storyline that happens under the surface, doesn't get said out loud, but really impacts on performance. And so, I've seen many times, I'm sure you have too, Jackie, that good people will be working away at a job that management think, "Oh, they're amazing, they're doing so well. They're just kicking so many goals." And next minute they leave, they're walking out the door and we go, "Why are you leaving?" And they'll tell us because, "Oh, I got a better opportunity. It's more pay." But actually most of the time it's because we haven't led them and treated them in a way that really gives them commitment to want to stay. And that takes more than just the logic and the rationale.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Quite a lot of the reasons people leave is because of their managers. It's often cited in studies that managers are at the core of why people are unhappy and move on. So how do you train yourself, not necessarily as an empath, but develop these empathy skills and intuition to understand the different types of people in your team, like the slacker who's very good at acting busy, and the person that's just treading water so quickly that they're almost drowning. So how do you tell?

Daniel Murray:
How do you tell? It's a good question. In my new book that I've put out recently there is a process for empathy that I break down. And the objective of writing this book was to help analytical people like me to see empathy less as a magical skill that some unicorns and fairies have and us mere mortals don't, but to see it as a process and a set of steps. And the first step that I think is really vital that will help with this is to be what I call consciously curious.

And so, what consciously curious means is to see people interacting and have a real ability to park your assumptions, put aside your biases, put aside all of the thoughts you've got going on, and just be really interested in what's actually happening, what's going on, to ask real open questions, to sit with people for long enough.

One of the things I see happen far too often is in a one-on-one with my team members, if people are going... well, I think, "Oh, what's the point? I don't need to do a one-on-one. They're going great." But that one-on-one isn't about you, it's about them. It's about them being able to have a trusted conversation to disclose what's actually going on and how they're really feeling, and for you to be able to help and support that person to continue to do their work well.

And so, one of the things that is really important in empathy and why I think it's so important for analytical people is we get guided by these very tangible assumptions based on facts and data, and we don't talk about the emotional drivers that are absolutely critical. Some people will tell me, "We don't need that in accounting, leave the emotions at the door."

But my guess is that you want employees who are passionate, who care about the work they do, who really want the quality to be up to a certain standard, who are committed to working hard as a team. And all of those factors are driven by emotion. They're not driven by logic.

Jacqueline Blondell:
So let's just take it from the viewpoint of someone who likes steps and processes. So where does the assumption part and the curiosity part fit in these steps to sort of developing a more empathetic style?

Daniel Murray:
Yeah, one of the things I really challenge people to do is add curiosity in where it doesn't seem like it's needed sometimes. I remember years and years ago hearing that Ralph Norris or Ralph Norris now who was the CEO at the time, if he saw a team have an exceptional result, he'd really want to know why. Because in his view, exceptional results could be a sign that something magical has happened or that something's gone wrong or that we've done something that we shouldn't have done, or there could be something at play there. And so, when you see something, even if it's really good, assuming that that means green lights and everything's fine can be really dangerous.

And so, this idea of you have heuristics and biases and mental models and assumptions all the time, and they're really important. When we don't challenge them enough, we create a lot of challenges for ourselves. And I think probably the most critical part for most people as leaders is to really look at what's the intention and the behaviour and the values that people are using to make decisions. And it sort of comes back to this idea of, "Yeah, we can do that.

It's within the rules, but should we?" Or "Yeah, we did get the right outcome, but did we do it for the right reasons? What was the intent driving that person to do that?" And that takes a lot more curiosity in asking questions, and it won't pop up on a spreadsheet for you. It's going to be that human conversation that allows you to uncover that.

Jacqueline Blondell:
So it's quite circular, really. Delegation doesn't end at when you're getting people to do something and then they do it, then you have to look at how they did it and what went well and sort of have a little postmortem about the situation.

Daniel Murray:
I think it's a really important thing to do because you want to sustain that over time. One of the problems in delegating, particularly in project world, particularly when you're doing a big audit or you've got some sort of impending deadline, is we tend to sit there and go, "Okay, let's all bunker down. Let's really work hard. Let's pull late-nighters" and let's do all that stuff that we've all done in our history and we'll get to that finish line and go, "Well done us."

But if we don't sit back and go, "Hang on, what in the planning process caused this huge panic at the end? How do we make sure next time we don't have that happen again? What went well? What didn't? What are the things we could change next time?"

Because unfortunately, what happens so often is... we used to see this a lot in consulting. A partner goes out, sells a piece of work, it's six weeks time. The end of the six weeks, everyone's exhausted because actually it was more like an eight or ten week piece of work, and the partner never gets any feedback to say it was a problem. And then what happens when they go to solve the next piece of work?

We jump on that hamster wheel again and we have all sorts of conversations around whose fault it was, but actually it's about everyone, particularly leaders who are in that work to ask those questions, be curious and work out how we can do things better next time.

Jacqueline Blondell:
That might be a way to having less stressful year ends for a lot of finance departments.

Daniel Murray:
I hope so.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Let's look at tips. Do you have any tips for curbing micromanagement tendencies? I think a lot of us have those. You were talking earlier about doing the work for people for young managers is common, but what about those people that hover? Hovering is bad, but it's really hard to have the faith in people that they're going to do what you've asked them to do.

Daniel Murray:
One of the tips I'd have is the shifting in the driver of that behaviour. So here's what I think drives a lot of that behaviour. It's a deep pride in the work that I do. I'm very proud of how well I do the work or how I do the work and the outcomes that I get. We get to the leadership role by being really exceptional often in the work that we do. And so, I have this pride in the work and now I have to delegate it, and I'm worried that it won't go so well. I'm worried they won't do as good a job as I did. I'm worried that the work won't be as good and therefore, it challenges that pride in the work.

I want to shift that pride not into the work, but into the people who do the work. I want you to be just as proud of the people who do the work as you were of the work itself. And watch them do the work, but get excited about helping them do the work better, get excited about helping them be experts, lifting them up. One of the things that I often say is good leaders build teams, great leaders build leaders.

And so, the more you as a leader can delegate with the objective of "This person's going to be better at my job when they get here than I ever was because I really want to lift them up. I want to support them. I want them to grow." And if we can shift that pride from the stuff to the people, that's really at the heart of good leadership, it's being exceptionally excited about lifting people up into those high positions.

Jacqueline Blondell:
It inspires them and probably makes them very loyal to you as a boss or as a manager.

Daniel Murray:
Let's just think of the two options here. One is I'm going to tell you how to do the work. I'm going to hover over you. I'm going to make you feel smaller. I'm going to care more about the output you give than you. What's that person going to feel? It's not hard to imagine how that might be. The second is, I'm going to support you. I'm going to be there for you. I'm going to back you up to clear any of the problems that I'm going to give you air cover. I'm going to do all the things I can to help you be amazing because I want you to win.

Now, if we just play that just for six months, how are these two people going to... the expectation is so obvious. We get so buried in the data and the detail, we don't think about that narrative that's going on for people. And I can tell you which group out of those two are going to win in the long run. It's pretty easy to see. But again, it is about shifting that emotion of pride. "I'm really proud of the work we do. I'm really proud of the people who do the work" instead of, "I'm really proud about what I can achieve. Look how good I am at Excel," or whatever it might be.

Jacqueline Blondell:
So when you've delegated your responsibility, say you've like, "Okay, I'm with my people, I support them," but you still need to keep an eye on how things are going. So do you check in regularly? How do you do it? Do you do it through Teams or through chats or through Slack or face-to-face? What's the ideal way of checking in and how often?

Daniel Murray:
Bad answer, but yes to any and all of those. The tip I'd give instead of trying to prescribe something. Because look, the problem is if you're working on a 12-month timeline and you check in every day, well, it might be too much, but it depends on the work. If you're not checking in at all, then of course that's a problem.

The thing I think is more important is just to clearly communicate how you are going to play a role and make sure that that's not a surprise. I think where people get really put off is they get given, "Okay, I need this done by the end of the month," and then next day my boss is walking in going, "Hey, how are things going?" "Well, hang on, I've got a lot of other stuff to do."

So if I have that clear communication where I say, "Look, we're going to get this done by the month. I really want to see some headway though. What can we get done by this afternoon? What can we do by tomorrow? Should we check in? Let's grab a chat. I don't expect to see it polished and perfect, but here's the sort of thing I'm thinking about tomorrow. Let me know how you go with that."

So I think if you set the expectations clearly and follow through on those expectations. People don't hate change. They don't hate getting followed up on. They don't hate feedback. What they hate is uncertainty and those surprise drop-ins, those, "I didn't realise this was supposed to happen," those miscommunications cause way more uncertainty and frustration for people than just doing it with clarity and honesty.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Sounds a bit like corporate harassment, that kind of approach. Well, Daniel, thanks so much for joining us today. It's been fantastic and you've given us some great insights.

Daniel Murray:
I really loved it. Thanks for having me.

Jacqueline Blondell:
For our listeners eager to learn more, please check out the show notes for links to Daniel's book, his website, and additional resources from CPA Australia. And don't forget to subscribe to INTHEBLACK and share this episode with your colleagues and friends in the business community. Until next time, thanks for listening.

Garreth Hanley:
To find out more about our other podcasts, check out the show notes for this episode, and we hope you can join us again next time for another episode of INTHEBLACK.