Delegation

Q. I’d like to be paid by the hour again. Last week, I tallied up the hours I spent at the office and at home working on this business. I take most of the risks in this company (the privilege of the owner!), and my take-out per hour is about level with my lowest-paid employee. Is there a better way?

A. This whole issue is so complex and so important to a modest-sized business that I will take the space needed to cover the subject. My coverage is not at the depth that a one-to-one relationship with a coach could reach. This response will aim to put a blanket on the topic. What may be appropriate in an individual case, is work in-depth on specific areas. You may benefit from a more narrowly focused interview.

There can be many or a single issue in play in the question. Some areas that could benefit from a closer look can be grouped into three broad categories, Employer, Employee, and Employer-Employee acting together. These areas are interrelated and, for discussion can be considered distinct.

Employer Areas:
1. Desire to have the business work for you
2. The Talent Reserve
3. Employer skill in delegation
4. Tolerance level for mistakes
5. Willingness to give up managerial “hobbies”
6. Letting employees see a real pro in action
7. Feedback /ongoing performance assessment
8. Employer clarity/ understanding of expectations about employee jobs/ responsibilities
9. Mopping up for past practices
10. Delegation, a familiar example
11. Other thoughts
12. Action Pan (To Do)

Employee Areas:
1. Employee understanding of expectations
2. Skill in the job assignment and knowledge in the over all purpose/ function of their department
3. Employee acceptance of his/ her role/ responsibility for personal development through growth in the job

Employer-Employee:
1. Skill in the job assignment and knowledge in the over all purpose/ function of their department-
    a broader look.
2. Mutual understanding and agreement about employee assignment/ job
3. Clarity/ unambiguous nature of the employee assignment

Now to the specifics:
Employer Areas
Desire to have the business work for you
The seminal decision that an employer/ owner must make is one that they alone can make. Are you in business to have a vehicle for you to do the thing you feel most capable of doing? Or are you in business to create more freedom for yourself and a more secure future for you and those closest to you? Some of my physician acquaintances have bemoaned the current state of health care. Their practices have high fixed and variable costs, while single payer reimbursements are going down. Many believe they are earning money to pay for their staff. You may have substantially more control than many in the health care industry. Are you the effective prisoner of your business? Does your business dictate to you, rather than having the business work for you?

The question that was posed above seemed to indicate dissatisfaction over the present state of affairs in the business. Let us proceed on the presumption of a desire to become freer and to make such changes in the business that the business can become less dependent on the owner’s unique skill.

With that as background, here are a few questions that must be addressed:
When will the work that the owner does be so extensive that there truly is no more time to accomplish any more?
To what extent are you more committed to the doing in your business, than to a willingness to change?
Disregarding, for the moment, the constraints of time money, etc., what would you want your relationship to the business to be in five years?

The talent reserve
What, of all the work the owner does, can be done by others? The immediate answer is usually, “It is much faster (has a higher success rate, higher quality outcome, etc.), if I do it.”

You are almost always correct in that response, but it doesn’t answer the question. While there are some truly one-time events in your business, and those events are what are brought up as examples, there are many routine or frequently occurring areas that can be put in the hands of others. . . with training. How much of your time will be saved over a period of a year, if you give away some of your duties? That needs to be your focus.
Put yet another way, if you were to analyze all that you do for your business, what would you pay to have each of your duties taken over by a competent person, or outsourced to a service provider. Now start at the least expensive and begin training one or more members of your staff to take over that task/ duty.

I recognize that making an assignment such as that is not as simple as it sounds. You will have more work in the short run.

Here’s a way around that:
Break the duty/ task into small increments. Describe to your employee where you are headed with the training effort. “I intend to have you take over the invoicing process. We’ll start by having you work with compiling the prices on the services/ products supplied to each customer we serve each week. So, let me show you how to do that.” Shortly, you won’t have to do the compiling. Move to the next most simple area.

Are those “others” currently employed in the business? Do you have a person in your business who can do (be trained to) the work you are considering delegating? Here we need to establish that you are not going to have a master at first. The work may take your employee much longer to accomplish than you would need for the same work. Compare the value of the time you have recaptured for yourself to the cost of having the employee do the work. If you are not hiring another person, there is no cost. If you must off-load that person (be very careful here about presuming the need to off-load), eventually, your system will absorb the time, find ways to stop busy-work, or outsource. You are then in a position to decide on the cost. Let’s say that the value of your time, working most productively, is $100/ hour. With a real contribution margin of 80%, you can afford to be spending $80/ hour out of pocket to have the work accomplished. Paying someone as much as $20/ hr and having them work at 25% of your efficiency, you break even-in the short run. No credit is given to the value of your being freed of the routine and giving you the opportunity to do bigger picture thinking. It also does not value the growth that occurs for the employee, professionally, personally, and in loyalty to the company.

Employer skill in delegation
This all points in the direction that the employer/ owner must afford the people in the company the opportunity to learn and perform their way into replacing the boss. No, we aren’t talking about rebellion or a palace coup. We are talking about permitting others in the company to show what latent capability they have. Achieving the employer/ owner’s primary responsibility for acquiring and keeping customers is possible only if he/she has the time and energy to focus on that area. It is only when the tasks and projects that sustain the business processes are being addressed satisfactorily by others that the employer/ owner can lift his/ her eyes from the busy work at hand to see the customer. When that happens, the possibility develops for creating the lasting bond that binds the customer to the business.

The master chef has aspiring chefs who create the dishes from the Master’s recipe. The master’s touch is now required only at critical point in the process. The owner must be physically and mentally available at those critical moments. To provide the trained talent among the staff so that the bulk of the time and attention is provided by staff, effective training is required.

One of the most frequently heard complaints form employers is that they can’t get good people. The work is piling up and the one person who knows enough about the business to get things done right is the owner/ boss. If true, this presents a situation which apparently defies solution.

Steven Covey laid out part of the remedy as Habit Seven of THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE (Simon & Schuster, 1989). He called it, “Sharpening the Saw.” In essence, it calls for developing capacity, personal and organizational to handle today’s work and to be ready for the challenges that tomorrow will bring.

Author and Consultant, Tom DeMarco, in his recent book, SLACK: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork and the Myth of Total Efficiency (Broadway Books, 2001) takes on the overload aspect of most of today’s organizations. With everyone being pushed to be more efficient, we have lost sight, to a great extent, of our level of effectiveness. For a business owner who is doing all the time, there is no time to plan and to “sharpen the saw.” Notice the irony in the tongue-in-cheek saying, “If it weren’t for customer interruptions, we could get some real work done around here.”

While you may be able, in the longer run, to hire people who are better able to handle the work than your current staff, you would be well-served in developing the capacity of the present staff to produce the outcomes you want. Don’t succumb to the temptation to agree with those who say that they don’t train because they’ll lose the trained talent to competition. As your training makes employees more valuable, recognize how they have grown by sharing some of the benefit that accrues to the business with the more-skilled employees. Heed the consultant’s guidance, “It’s better to have a few trained employees leave, than to be staffed with ill-trained employees.”

What work currently done by the owner could be assigned to others if they were given the training?
How many of the tasks that people do daily have a standard procedure for the task? Is it written?
Could your business be franchised? Today?

Tolerance level for mistakes
Would it surprise you that delegation requires even more work, short term, than continuing on the current path? Whatever the level of work demanded by sharpening the saw in the near term, it will pay hugely as time goes by. The “backlog” is building at some rate. There will come a point at which the boss will be doing even more than he/ she is now. Let’s think about that as extra or overtime work. That same additional work time can be invested now. That investment is in training employees to handle a part of the boss’s work as it exists today. Then as the work builds, instead of adding to the owners load, trained employees can shoulder the effort... and do it fairly well. The “now” work will be incrementally greater as the commitment to delegation is instituted. So the prospect of a 25% increase in work load now, brought about by delegation, is a classic case of, “Pay me now or pay me later.”

The employer must initially be tolerant of some mistakes. As you train and delegate, look for the distinction between well-intended error and careless blunder. Be alert to the temptation to cover errors. You will be tested.

Employee errors could be classes into those that are reported and those that are not reported. You must reward/ acknowledge the behavior of reporting an error while recognizing the need to re-check the employee’s capability to handle the assignment. Recognize by saying, “Thanks for letting me know. Now, how do you intended to handle the mistake area in the future? Do you need help learning that?”

Do not tolerate a cover up or a long wait before you are informed. It must be clear to employees that a long wait is a worse offense than the error itself. The longer the wait, the more intense your dissatisfaction....with the delay.

Your progress in training and delegating will be, in large measure, proportionate with your toleration of errors in the beginning of any specific task delegation. When someone can do the work competently, a performance framework can be built that describes the boundary conditions, such as, time to complete, cost of materials, quality level to be achieved, and others.

Willingness to give up managerial “hobbies”
What time and energy you invest in staff development now will create dividends for you. The alternative is that (if you retain your current customer base) the time and energy demand of working in the business will grow to be as consuming as the current work + staff development would have been. Are you willing to have another person do some of the parts of your business where you are particularly competent, or that you find most satisfying? These are management hobbies. Some work does not require the “Master Chef’s touch.”

The prospect of being entirely consumed by the business should be more frightening / motivating for you than any issue of how much you are “being paid” for the time spent caring for your business (the issue that started this discussion), or the prospect of letting go of an element of the business operation that you might enjoy.

Letting your employees see a real pro in action
The short of it is that a growing business, in which all the critical tasks are done by the owner / boss, is being managed by a Superman wannabe.. Superman is a fictional (“in your dreams!”) character. There is no requirement for you to prove anything to any one of your employees. You don’t need to grandstand for one or all of them. Most of the skills you have can be transferred or, in other ways, taught to your employees if they are willing to learn. Employees should be showing off for the boss. An employee proves her value to you in the diligence of her attention and the speed with which she acquires new skills that are relevant to advancing your business. Don’t be trapped by an employee convincing you that you can take better care of the particular assignment or (William Oncken’s term) “monkey” (Oncken Jr.,William, Managing Management Time - Who’s got the Monkey?, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1984.) than she can, and wouldn’t it be great if the (problem) monkey received the care of a real pro.

Many of the more astute observers of business have written that in today’s world no one manages a growing business by him-herself. You must delegate.

Feedback/ on-going performance assessment
Delegation can be a tricky process. You may find yourself with a good deal more work at first. You must be willing to engage employees coming from the belief that they really do want to do a good job. It is you responsibility to know what a good job looks like and frequently (as soon after the action as possible) to review with the employee what was done and where the gap is between your view of what was required, and what was actually done. Then plan next steps.

A significant part of the answer to the dilemma of feedback is deliberate delegation. The employee should know in advance what it is that you expect will be accomplished. You must take whatever time is needed to be certain that you are assigning a task that the employee is capable of accomplishing. That means that if the employee is not capable of producing an acceptable result, the task should not be assigned until the degree of accomplishment you expect is within the employee’s capability. Does that sound like a compromise? Perhaps. I invite you to consider that the task can be divided into pieces that can be accomplished by the combination of employee skill and supervisory direction. An employee who is not maliciously incompetent will grow by using present skills and learning the next skill through instruction and supervised practice. If you know of another way, please use this email link to let me know how else it can be done.

Employer clarity / understanding of expectations about employee jobs/ responsibilities
There are boundaries to employee discretion in fulfilling job responsibilities. An act of delegation is not complete without a discussion about those bounds. Some of the possible conversation could be so basic as to be insulting or demeaning. Most of the conversations about what is to be done or how the employee intends to tackle the assignment are a source of learning for both parties. The supervisory person learns where the gaps are in the employees understanding, and the employee often avoids the embarrassment of an expensive mistake. The supervisor may gain insight into the mis-match in the employee’s learning style and the supervisor’s teaching style. Useful? I guess!

Mopping up for past practices
Changing the employees' relationship toward more receptivity with respect to delegation requires replacement or repair of history that may be inhibiting its acceptance. If some workplace experience has created a reluctance to engage, the condition calls for attention.
"What, would' st thou have a serpent sting thee twice?," wrote Shakespeare in Act 4 of The Merchant of Venice. So it is with employees. Unintentional as it may have been, there may well be countless small behaviors that you have extinguished in the business action repertoire of your employees through your past reactions. Since the specifics of the experience, both observational and interpersonal, have drifted off into the ether, you must take overt action to re-establish a neutral ground. Employees may have learned the "lessons" by seeing other people burned by an inadvertent put-down or taken to task unfairly, or it could have happened to them.
Being alert to a push-back (attempts to avoid the delegation by raising barriers to accepting the additional responsibility), seeking reinforcement for the smallest of actions in the new area, frequent checking before a next move are typical of a person who is a bit "gun-shy," fearing to make a wrong move.

Trust is the prediction, usually mostly emotional, of how a person will be treated. We create trust through our history with others. Some of how they judge us comes from direct contact, most comes through observation and second hand testimony. We have the most influence on the direct contact. It affects one person and, through that individual, may have an influence on many others.

As the leader, acknowledge that there may be a history. As part of the training for the new responsibility, refer to the possibility that you may have done something to put them on alert to the second sting of the serpent. Begin to self-observe your reactions to employee mistakes or reluctance. Request that they make you aware when you do or say something that reinforces a previous dis-empowering experience. Take action as appropriate to make it right. You are building what Covey calls the emotional bank account. It will support you in accomplishing what you intend-delegating a part of what you do to another person.

Delegation, a familiar example
Let’s start with a distinction around the term. Delegation is different from giving an assignment. It is consistent with the phrase "placing in the care of." Taken in its most literal sense, it may be similar to your relationship with a new babysitter. You set the ground rules (no boy friend visits, kids in bed by nine, snacks in the pantry, soft drinks in the ‘fridge, pay attention to the kids, and here’s the emergency phone numbers, including were we’ll be.)

	You have done the following in this baby-sitter scenario
	You have checked the candidate’s credentials/ recommendations/ endorsements
	You (or your spouse) have interviewed the candidate
	You have hired this assistant.
	You have described the assignment.
	You have reviewed boundaries of employee discretion in fulfilling job responsibilities
	You have made reference to behaviors that are inappropriate in this context.
	Because the relationship is new, you have asked questions to test the clarity of your instructions and the sitter’s comprehension of the rules and the guidelines for her conduct
	You have set the parameters of her assignment. She knows, in general terms at least, under what circumstances to invite you back into the picture, either through seeking your direction/ advice, further     clarification, or physical presence.
	You have described expected actions in out-of-the routine occurrences
	You have made available additional resources- emergency phone numbers, for example.
	You have given her additional tools with which to perform her assignment such as a VCR with kids' movie, access to the TV with its built-in V-chip, the computer with its site viewing level set and password protected, along with the freedom to motivate (bribe?) compliance to the "rules" that have been set for your "little angels."
	You have made yourself available for questions to clarify the details of the assignment, in the event that some areas remain insufficiently clear
	Among the most important elements of delegation, you have described the outcome intended, put a time frame on completion of the assignment, outlined the boundaries of her discretion, and,
	You stopped doing the work that you assigned to the baby -sitter

The success of the delegation event depends on the level to which you (and to a lesser extent, the sitter) have performed relative to the delegation event. Since you are committed to an on-going relationship with this sitter (given an acceptable performance on this night), there are other things you will do:

	Enhance the employment situation by identifying work environment issues
	Provide incentives / rewards for improved work performance
	Be open to feedback about the job and the work assigned
	Ask for feedback on the instructions
	Share some tricks-of the trade about control of the "angels"
	Do a careful, measured review of areas that you particularly liked about her performance

You have promised your spouse that there are some things/ actions you will not do with this sitter, among which is to raise your voice or nit-pick about minor "mistakes." You also said you would be open to doing some other things, such as providing an opportunity to have her tell you what, if anything, she would do differently next time, and comments about what you would prefer that she do differently next time.

Some business areas may be outside of this example

We said that the example parallels supervisory delegation rather well. Ordinarily, the baby-sitter is not treated to the workplace phenomenon of “letting your employees see a real pro in action.”

Fundamentals
Here are some things that seem fundamental in the process:

• Assignments must have boundaries (what’s in and what’s not)
• Outcomes must be measurable, and they must be measured
• There will be a learning process (is there more learning possible in “success” or in “failure?”)
• Some assignments will be done less efficiently by the subordinate (than by the supervisor)
• Some assignments will be done more effectively by the subordinate
• Clarity is vital around the extent of acceptable error, circumstances in which the more expert boss
      is to be called in, existing process for job accomplishment
• Regular contact between parties to the delegation must be scheduled and conducted to reinforce
      what is going well and to make corrections in what is not going so well

  Other thoughts
  There is a temptation, be it ever so subtle, to engage in competition with you employee over who does this job better. BEWARE. This is totally counterproductive. You must learn to compliment employees for progress toward mastery of new assignments. Rarely will a naive person be able to do the job as well as an experienced person. Some stumbling and missteps are part of the learning process. Acknowledgment should not be withheld until mastery is achieved. Progress is what is to be rewarded through acknowledgment.

  Time that you recover by having people do the work that you have been doing can be put to use. You can re-invest those dividends into more training and development, ultimately freeing even more time. At some point the outcome of the delegation process is to give you back your life.

  Carefully documented, the training that takes place can create value in your business by developing business processes. These processes can then be used as an operating manual. The operating manual is a huge asset, as it becomes a source and a record of “how we work around here.” Only a fool would buy a business whose processes were not captured in an operating manual.

  Action Plan (To Do):
  Confer with your top layer of management. Tell them that you will retain both responsibility and accountability for areas that demand your unique combination of skill and experience. Then tell your people that you intend, over the next 3 to 6 months, to extricate yourself from more and more of the day-to-day activity in the business.

  Tell them that the extra load that you are delegating to them must be handled despite the seeming overload situation. You will add to their work load at a rate slightly faster than you think they can responsibly and effectively off-load portions of the work there are currently handling to others who are capable or who can be trained to be capable of handling it. In some instances, work being done by others in your company may be eliminated entirely, as it serves no useful purpose (busy work).

  
  Employee Areas
  Successful delegation requires that participants accept their role in creating a successful outcome both in having the job done well and in having the participants grow personally and professionally for the experience.
  
  • Employer areas are covered above.
  • Employee understanding of expectations
  • Employee skill in their job assignment and knowledge of the overall purpose/ function of their department.
  • Employee acceptance of his/ her role/ responsibility for personal development through growth in the job
    
    As we address these elements, we must consider what’s in it for the employee. The list that follows has elements that may apply in a given situation (some others may also be in play that are not included. The writer would appreciate your contribution about any other elements that could also apply.):
    

    Job security is enhanced by becoming a more valuable employee (EE) through demonstrated competence in additional phases of the enterprise Employee grows personally through acceptance of another level of responsibility/ accountability Company is stronger because the dependence on one person is reduced Company can be stronger because the owner can begin to focus on the larger issues of direction, growth, customer relations, etc. Because the EE can contribute more to the company, that person’s market value is improved, justifying higher pay.

    
    Employee understanding of expectations:
    It is a partnership in understanding that is being developed in the delegation process. The owner/manager has a picture of the area in question. Assume for the moment that (s)he has a moderately clear understanding of what (s)he expects the employee to accomplish (that may not always be the case). The owner/manager delegates in a dialogue with the employee.
    
    In all of humankind, communication is a convoluted and distorted process. People have an agenda running in their mind. Commonly it is called WIIFM. The volume is often as loud as the boom boxes we have grown to love. Station WIIFM (stands for, What’s In It For Me?) contributes to the distortion because it often amplifies the portions of an assignment that could show up as a threat. “This assignment is a set-up.” “He’s asking me to do something that’s not my job.” “I haven’t been trained for this.” may be in simulcast during the presentation of the details of the assignment. While the employee has some control over the volume, he/she has not exercised control of the broadcast content often enough to have a major influence on it. The result is that the assignment may be incompletely given without a two-sided conversation.

    The owner/manager must test for the clarity of the assignment and for the understanding of its details. The employee is obliged to engage and respond with an objective of achieving the highest possible understanding of the details and importance of the assignment/ delegation. The employee’s proximity to the job affords a useful prospective. The employee needs to “what if?” the owner/manager to define the territory. “What’s in, what’s not?” “What freedom do I have to be creative?” “What are the limits of my authority (money, time, resources, acceptable error rate, report frequency, mandatory kick it upstairs conditions/ circumstances)?”

    During President Reagan’s administration, an incident occurred in the Mediterranean in the Gulf of Sidra, near Libya. There were two Libyan fighter jets that made aggressive moves and released a missile at U.S. fighter aircraft from the carrier on patrol. One of the Libyan jets was downed. The President was notified the following morning. The Press was unnerved by the fact that President Reagan was not awakened either during or directly after the incident. What they failed or refused to understand was that the Admiral, who was the commander on the scene, had been fully briefed by the Defense Secretary and the President in a session in Washington before the deployment of the carrier task force. The commander knew the limits of his authority as well as the mission he was there to achieve: Maintain the freedom of the seas in an area that the Libyan dictator had staked a claim for in his proclamation of the “line of death.”

    When you delegate, that incident may serve as a model of thorough understanding by the subordinate of the situation, mission, degree of freedom and reporting requirements.
    
    Employee skill in their job assignment and knowledge in the over all purpose/function of their department
    It is not intuitively obvious that this is a joint responsibility area. More often that I care to remember, supervisory and managerial personnel have acknowledged their belief that the employee "should have known XXXX." Where the “should” came from has not yet been determined except in cases where a face-to face meeting has occurred between the employee and his/ her direct supervisor. The condition is not unique to hourly-paid employees. Managers of every stripe have themselves said that of those who report to them as well as about those to whom they report.
    
    The specific detail of what it is that they "should have known" ranges from legitimate auditing practices to on the job safety rules, from acceptable business practices in closing big ticket contracts to stealing pencils and what constitutes acceptable product/ service quality levels. As in other areas of human behavior and relations, you can ill-afford to presume that someone else knows what is needed or appropriate in a given situation. (Refer to the President Reagan-Gulf of Sidra episode earlier). The more serious the consequence stemming for non-compliance, the more the need to be certain of the understanding held by other players. While there is more that could be said of the downside associated within mutual mis-understanding, it is the upside that holds the greatest possibility.
    
    In many respects, it is the area with the highest potential for relieving the over-burdened executive or business owner. In his wonderful book, Moments of Truth, the one-time CEO of SAS, the Scandinavian Airline company, describes his smashing success in turning the fortunes of the airline from heavy loses to wild profitability (for its time). Underlying the success was his developing the acceptance of individual roles in the creation of a great airline. Jan Carlsson, as President and CEO, developed and sold the concept of Moments of Truth. He reasoned and educated all the employees of SAS that they were the airline. The concept took many forms. As a pilot, you were accountable to those who were willing (or able) to live by the rules that were established. Get to the gate in time for your flight. Have your tickets in order. Be ready to board when called. In return, we will leave on time to arrive on time. If you were part of the "ground support" group, you were to use every opportunity that arose to represent your airline well in you interaction with customers or potential customers. "Ground support" encompassed everyone serving customers of SAS, and many, who customers could have thought were SAS people. So, the baggage handlers and waiting area maintenance workers were included in the contacts. The phrase, "moment of truth," came to mean any occasion when you, an employee or associate of SAS, had the opportunity to have that contact remembered as especially pleasant or distinctively otherwise. The issue was not, no complaints. Instead, the issue was, especially pleasant = acceptable and desired, and any other outcome = less than desired and therefore, not up to standard. While much went on in the company outside of this initiative, Carlsson attributes much of the success of SAS to Moments of Truth. Have you had a conversation with any of your employees about their role in customer relations? Does every last employee in the organization recognize the expectation you have about their role and the significance it plays in the success of your company? The more the EE knows about the company’s mission and the role of his/her department and job, the better able that person will be to handle a delegated area.
    
    Employee acceptance of his/ her role/ responsibility for personal development through growth in the job
    Motivational speaker and lecturer, Jim Rohn, once remarked, “It’s a ladder, not a bed.” While he was, at the time, speaking about the concept of minimum wage, the statement has other implications. Taking the ladder metaphor as a model, then each rung must be seen as earned advancement. The earned element is a function of increased competence and performance. Implied is, that the subject moves up in the organization (up the ladder) as an outcome of effort made and the employee’s value developed, revealed, or uncovered. That employee is in an often unacknowledged contract: In exchange for employee increased value to the organization, the organization responds with wider or more highly leveraged responsibility, or other form of reward.

    The ideal employee is a person committed to master current job demands as the foundation for becoming more than a caretaker. Instead, the employee uses personal and organizational resources and time to create disproportionate value to the organization. A neophyte in a job scrambles to keep up. As competence and confidence increase, the worker looks for ways to become more effective and efficient. The ideal employee takes advantage of every opportunity for personal development.

    Napoleon Hill is given credit for telling business owners that training employees and having them leave is better than not training employees and having them stay. How many employees have retired but haven’t gotten around to notifying the company or discontinuing the practice of endorsing and depositing pay checks?
    
    Employer and Employee(s) acting together
    Employee skill in their job assignment and knowledge in the over all purpose/function of their department - a broader view While the job skill and the purpose seem to be a distinctly an employee function, I have a purpose in listing it also in the area of joint responsibility. No matter how new to the arena of work, or to the area of the work assignment, an employee comes to the job with specific and general job skills. Some skills are academic, read (and comprehend) our language, write, do math, and speak a jargon and slang-free version of American English (for U.S. types, other languages as they apply in another locale). Other skills are consistent with life in a society, getting along with others, dealing fairly with others, as, fellow employees, customers, and employer. These areas are now being grouped under the general term of emotional intelligence. (see works by Daniel Goleman, et.al., such as Emotional Intelligence, and Working with Emotional Intelligence, published by Bantam Books)
    
    Other skills are more job-specific, such as, learning to re-fold a blouse in a display, after a customer has examined it and left it on the display; making sure that the pickles and onion and the special sauce are assembled into the McDonald's burger in just the right order and proportion.
    
    No where is the responsibility of employer and employee working together for the desired outcome greater than in training. This is so because the system works much more efficiently when both are in a partnership. The trainee tells the trainer about gaps in the trainee's knowledge and skill. While the trainer is responsible for doing the training, the trainee is responsible for becoming a skilled employee. One provides the tools, the other must use all resources necessary to transform him (her) self into that skilled employee. The trainer and by inference, management, through the setting and communication of expectations, must create the climate during instruction to invite being challenged by employees for more clarity, more accessible phrasing or demonstration, to enable the employee to grasp the training being provided.
    
    What this looks like in practice is something like this: Instructor/ trainer tells the trainee(s) what is the expected outcome of the module of training about to be undertaken. The trainer explains where and how the skill will be used. He tells the group about his approach to the training and what they will be able to do at the successful completion of the work ahead. At times during the training, the trainee requests clarification or demonstration of the particular facet of the training that is not well understood. Trainee may also request more time to interact with systems and hardware needed for better assimilation of the training experience. Trainers accept that mode of feedback. They see it as an area where their delivery can be improved or enhanced- not as either a criticism or a reflection of the intelligence or interest of the trainee (except in a positive or constructive vein). Instructors should know that some people understand and can apply learning if it is demonstrated; others learn best by trying to perform with a "new" skill, while still others accumulate knowledge and skill through hearing it described or by reading from a cook-book/ instruction manual. The key element is setting the climate for a free exchange between trainee and trainer.
    
    Purpose and function are a different kind of learning. Here the employee is not being asked frequently to demonstrate the learned skill. Instead, the employee is being asked to contextualize his/ her actions. The actions of an employee, taken as a whole, must support the direction intended by management. For example, let's say that customer retention is part of a company's way of doing business, a way of being on the part of all in the firm. It is only through monitoring behavior, either by on-site observation or through the familiar satisfaction surveys, that much is learned about how employees serve customers.
    
    "As part of our commitment to customer service, this call may be recorded," Have you heard this before? How many companies actually listen to the recorded interaction on the telephone? By making the investment of money and supervisory time and attention, the management of a company observes how completely the employees have grasped the purpose of the job function and of the department in which they work. By doing so, remedial action, be it training or revision of the process can be initiated out of knowledge. To do otherwise is to invest company resources in an empty hole.
    
    None of what has been outlined above is effective in the long-run (the only truly useful time frame) without the diligent follow-up, open inquiry and remedial steps taken to improve the processes and the performance of those who operate the processes within the company. As with so many other supervisory skills, delegation is a learned behavior. The framework must be established by means such as has been outlined in this article. The framework is the beginning. The climate for delegation, the incremental improvement and breakthroughs must be supported by an interested management group, either by their own day-to-day involvement or through the use of a management/ supervisory coach regime. Measurement of outcomes and other internal metrics must be established to monitor progress and insure that progress is being maintained.
    
    I invite the reader to review other perspectives on this subject. Here are a few that I have read since publicizing my views:
    
    Delegation Tips Liraz Publishing Co
    http://www.liraz.com/tdelegat.htm
    
    http://learn.sdstate.edu/craigg/N454Module3x/sld001.htm
    
    Delegation is covered within an interesting and broader presentation.
    
    Delegating to Employees
    http://www.mapnp.org/library/guiding/delegate/delegate.htm
    
    Basics of Delegating
    http://www.mapnp.org/library/guiding/delegate/basics.htm
    
    
    John McCabe- john@JJMcoach.com . All rights reserved. The author requests the reader’s feedback. Professional courtesy requires complete attribution of any of this original work.

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