The Art of Delegation

 

The Art of Delegation

As a leader, we sometimes find that our days are long and hectic and that we often risk being derailed by unexpected developments that demand our attention. And in these kinds of scenarios, delegation is the best time-saving method in the long run. The ability to delegate is an essential skill for leaders that enhances their leadership skills and develops teamwork that lets individuals with different set of talents, roles & responsibilities to come together. If executed properly, delegation empowers the team to work collaboratively and create trust but if done poorly, creates distrust among the people. So, nearly all leaders agree that delegation is useful for them.

The question that tickles in a layman’s mind is that if delegation is useful, why don’t some leaders practice it? One reason for lack of delegation is the leaders hesitancy to give up control while being held accountable for the outcome. The leader may fear that the staff member lacks the knowledge and experience to complete a delegated task and consequently, it will not be done well. Or a leader may feel that doing a job differently means it is not done well.

And some leaders even hesitate to delegate because it threatens their power structure. Insecure leaders may believe that they will be perceived as less important or less capable than their subordinates who may prove more capable than them. Many leaders also do not realize what should be delegated and what not. And the unfamiliarity with the task in hand may leave the leader in a position where he will be too cautious about the delegation of that particular task. However, apart the restriction or things that refrain leaders from delegation, it is equally important for them to understand the importance and the need of delegation to produce more effective results.

 

·        Effective delegation benefits the leader, the staff and the organization. Effective delegation demands feedback from the employee, and when there is more feedback, it will strengthen the decision-making ability of the leader. A key benefit of delegation is that the quantity & quality of work is improved even In the absence of leader.

·        Delegation can act as a powerful motivator for team members. It can develop their decision making abilities which will contribute to more creative problem solving in the organization. It also results in improved self-esteem & morale of the staff and the team members have a more positive attitude and commitment to the organization.

·        Delegation decreases the gap between the administration and staff members. Because delegation brings down the important decision closer to the frontline and the team members participate in it more and more which helps in creating a healthier work environment & positive image of the organization.

 

How to Delegate Effectively?

 

1.     Set Objectives: To be effective in an organization, a leader needs to now their particular objectives- so that they know where they are heading. An effective objective is SMART. It stands for:

 

·        Specific— stating exactly what needs to be achieved.

·        Measurable— so that you can tell when the task has been done properly.

·        Achievable—the objective has to be realistic within a certain time frame with the availability of the required resources.

·        Relevant—which must be fitting in line with those who has the role to achieve the objective and also to the wider objectives of the organization.

·        Time-bound—it is important to give some guidance about deadlines and time frames to achieve the objectives.

 

2.     Monitoring the delegated task: By monitoring the delegated task, you will be able to see the potential problems at an early stage and you can guide your team members to make the necessary changes. It’s important also not to over-delegate the task on team members . Bear in mind how the team members are likely to respond to it if you show some confidence in their abilities and keep intervening in the job.

You can have informal discussion with the staff to get much better insights in the delegated task. If you uncover a potential problem while monitoring the delegated task, be tactful in pointing it out to the team member. Bear in mind that you do not have to criticize them in case they make some mistakes, your motive is to support them and help them become better.

3.     Review the delegated task: Although you may review progress when the task is underway, it is also important to review it when its completed. It is an important time after the completion of task to consider its success with your team members so as to learn from the experience and to plan improvements for the future.

When reviewing a delegated task, it is best to let your team members get the praise for work successfully done, but to accept the blame yourself when things have gone wrong. As Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam once said, “ When failure comes, a great leader absorbs the failure, but when success comes, he gives it to his team members.”

CONCLUSION

Delegation is both an art and a science. The basic principles behind delegation as mentioned in the above discussion are as follows:

·        Set Objectives; Define your objectives in accordance with the SMART. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound goals or objectives which a leader needs to decide while delegating a task to the staff or team members.

·        Monitor the delegated task: Check the progress of the team by regular visitation or informal conversation.

·        Review the delegated task: Check for areas of improvement and potential threats.

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P.I.E Leadership

 

P.I.E Leadership

P.I.E Leadership

There are some basic elements which an individual or a leader require and must cultivate in themselves to move up the ladder of their career success. These principles are woven into every job category, into every management decision, into every high stake conversation, into every advancement opportunity in which promotions are key contributing factor. These three-basic elements in the language of business are Performance, Image & Exposure (P.I.E).  But the predicament is that most leaders are not aware of these three key factors contributing to their growth resulting in average results even with high input. Each of the three P.I.E elements are essential to promotion but have different roles & weights relative t their impact on long-term success. These elements are not only important in your career success but also helps you to harness your abilities & become a much better leader. So, let’s dig a little deeper and take a closer look at each of these elements:

 

Img Source: modofrank

1.       Performance (10%): Performance forms a key role in the P.I.E formula for career success because the first thing that an organization considers from analyzing your portfolio is how well you have performed and whether you are consistent with your previous track record or not. Although the weight of performance In career promotion is only 10% but still it’s the minimum qualification that you must have to appear for the real test. The first key to enhancing your organizational performance is to understand what does real performance means for your manager or boss? That might be different when weighed from his perspective. So, determine your managers key measurement and then link your duties to these measurements.

 

P.I.E Leadership

                                             Be specific in your mind regarding what you need to accomplish to earn an outstanding ranking. Assign the amount of time to each task and manage it effectively by giving time to goals of more importance. This sounds simple but if you set your objectives right and specify them according to the ultimate goal, then your performance curve will increase exponentially. It’s important, however, to keep asking yourself some key questions about your finished work like: Is this the best that I could have done? And if not, then how can I make it my best work? Because the work you do must leave a positive message on your boss looking at which he might be able to tell that you are reliable, ambitious, creative thinker, productive, well-organized, striving to do your best & improving on every single opportunity you get to do something creative.

 

2.       Image (30%): As they say, “You might not get a second chance to make a good first impression, so you might as well give it your best in the very first opportunity you get”. What other people in your organization think about you contributes a lot to your personal growth in that organization. When it comes to ‘Image’, most people confuse it with the word ‘reputation’. It is important to consider that your reputation is merely what you show others who you are. But your character is really judged by what they say and think about you in your absence. Most leaders never consider this aspect of ‘Image’ In their personal character and focus just on improving their skills & abilities which surely leads to a handsome performance but a poor Image.

P.I.E Leadership

                                                                                Image includes many areas of personal expression, the way you talk, the way you walk, your pleasant or foul demeanor. An individual or a leader must take a look at these aspects periodically & see if they are aligned with these checkpoints or not. Dale Carnegie in his book “How to win friends & Influence people” tells that many great leaders like Abraham Lincoln contribute a lot of their success to how they treated other people. It normally may take 25 years to build an Image but 25 seconds to ruin it with a little act of misconduct. If you are a leader who is serious about building on high growth levels then you need to soberly & conscientiously think on how you communicate with others, dress yourself, talk and how you treat your colleagues, seniors and most importantly your subordinates for they make a whole lot of your Image as a leader.

 

P.I.E Leadership

3.       Exposure (60%): As you can see, exposure is the element of P.I.E formula that has the greatest impact on your career. This is the area of the game where all of our choices are played and experienced. These experiences allow you to evaluate whether you are content at your current level or to decide to make choices that you need to make to change your current level. Therefore, it is extremely important to gain, maintain and enhance your personal visibility & exposure in the organization. To get the maximum exposure inside your organization, you must visibly demonstrate a team player spirit, be willing to learn new skills and experience different situations. It is natural for people t bond together with people that they already know, but it is of equal importance to get yoked up with people outside the organization who may have potential connections with your organization. If you need your leadership potential be developed 100% & also progress on your career ladder at the same time, you need to reflect on P.I.E formula and expose yourself more to new people, experiences & learn more from them because that is how people will know you more and reap the benefits of exposure.

 

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Reflect on your WHY

 

Reflect on your WHY

Reflect on your WHY

One thing that has become certain with the advent of modernization & technology is that the pace of life has increased to a considerable extent in terms of how people spend their time. And the results are chaos and uncertainty which is pretty much ubiquitous in the contemporary world. In the midst of all this, people have less time to reflect on their WHY. They keep searching for ways to get the most out of new opportunities, set new goals, collaborate with people to start startups & some hope for a turnaround to take place. While all these are good but if they do not look at the broader objective for manifesting their ideas, there will certainly be ramifications that cannot be avoided.

So the analogy is that if you take actions with a certain motive behind it intelligible in your mind then the probability of reaping the benefits from that action are higher than if you do it without any intangible plan. Therefore, its necessary for us to periodically keep reflecting on the ultimate purpose of our lives to get a crystal clear perspective on decisions that we make. The trick is to know when you are just busy and times where you are actually progressing towards your higher purpose.

The predicament is that most people are busy and not productive. They keep going to the same place where they receive no value addition in themselves as a person and then die working hard all their life but never ever tried to fulfill their purpose. And the reason is pretty simple: They did not reflected on their WHY. Sometimes we consume all our time in activities that make no sense at all and at the end of all that play, we realize that we have no more time to battle with the real thing (which is your purpose).

Reflect on your WHY

People get too much excited about festivals and events that they consider to be special but I wonder that they never consider every day as equally important as the others. They get excited about the new year, but never soberly & conscientiously ponder over what they did with the year that just passed by? But when you live your life in moving towards your ultimate purpose then each day in your life becomes important. It’s your purpose that not only makes you sit for late hours in the night but also wakes you up early in the morning. When you are learning something each day to get closer to your destiny, you experience true joy. It is that relentless pursuit of your vision that brings importance to each day of your life. When you are progressing towards your end (purpose), you say to yourself everyday, “This is the most important day of my life and I am going to live it like that!”. When you are sensible concerning your destiny, you choose who you associate with and the quality of your time that you use or to the worst squander. You choose it!

Reflect on your WHY

Generally, whenever a terrible act like suicide happens, the person usually leaves a note before they kill themselves. And the note usually says, “I had no reason for living!”. Probably they never had a strong WHY for living. Therefore, its vital to spend sometime every year, every month, every week and every day with yourself and ask a question to yourself: Am I still aligned with my WHY? Or do I need to adjust a little bit? Remember, your WHY is what gives your life its meaning. It gives you hope because as they say, “If you have a WHY, then you can bear almost ANYHOW!”. Share your perspective!

Reflect on your WHY

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Leading with Influence

 

Leading With Influence

 

Much of today’s leadership thought revolves around the aspect of using the position provided by the organization to exercise authority over the team members or on followers to persuade them into doing what’s best for the organization. While that may prove helpful in some cases where the environment is too casual in the organization but it’s not quite promising to expect best results from Authoritarian leadership style. It’s not authority that drives and motivates people  to achieve a desired task but the influence that the leader creates in the long run. Influence is a key element in any successful leadership strategy when executed in the right way. And influence is not generally manifested until & unless a leader stands their ground on the following three criteria:

1.       Authenticity:

A leader needs to be precise in what they want from the followers. They need to have a clear purpose & a vision. They etymology of the word ‘authentic; can be traced back to the Greek word ‘authento’ which means to ‘have full power’. This reflects that when the word ‘authentic’ is attached with a leader, he or she is a master in his or her own domain and areas of competence. And it is this mastery in their domain which produces influence. To put this into perspective, we can consider an early reference to authentic functioning in Socrates view of self-enquiry as he argued that an ‘unexamined life’ is not worth living. So a leader constantly needs to pursue knowing themselves and refining their skills to become a master of their domain or areas of competence.

2.       Integrity:

Integrity is arguably the most important component in your leadership journey if you want to make an impact on people despite your position or authority. To be an Integrated leader means to be completely aligned with your beliefs, values and convictions. It means that you won’t compromise on your moral values & ethical considerations despite of what circumstances you are facing at any moment of your personal or professional life.

The ethical part of leadership has been sharply questioned particularly by leaders who failed to live by some intact principles & standards. So, is it worth for a leader to remain ethical? Or can they just preach and not practice it? The answer is an absolute YES! Because leadership is an act which involves the trust of the followers. And in any given scenario, if you violate that basic entity which is the very foundation of a stable relationship between a leader & a follower, you have just uprooted yourself from being an Influential leader to merely an authoritative leader.

Great leaders of the history like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and many others showed an exemplary character which formed the foundation of their leadership abilities. They had this unique quality of leading the masses with their influence produced by their integrity to their convictions which separated them by a distance from leaders who had authority but no influence because of the fact that they failed to live by some intact moral principles & ethical boundaries. And to prevent that from happening, you must share your values with your team members so that it gets deeply ingrained in their mind and become a culture of the organization.

3.       Put People First:

This is the point where Servant leadership comes into play. A Servant leader is one whose motivation is to meet the needs of his/her team members so that they could work without considering any ramifications, worries or poignancies of their professional or personal life

Authoritarian leadership does not necessarily guarantee the successful implementation of the ideas or the strategy of the leader. It is only when the leader leads with his own example that the team or the staff members can act on leaders mandate. When a leader leads by example, it can bring about both organizational change and also employee engagement. And since Employee engagement is directly linked with the organizational change, therefore, it is necessary for a leader to focus more on themselves and how they want to present themselves in front of people they lead. They need to carefully analyze themselves and regularly ask questions such as: What kind of qualities do I need my people to incorporate in themselves and do I have those qualities in me?  Or What kind of a leader would I like to follow and then improve yourself to become that Ideal leader whom you would like to follow.

If the leader can release the abilities of the employees by having a healthy relationship with them and providing them more & more opportunities for growth, then the employees are automatically going to lead the organizational change even in the absence of authority and work collaboratively to thrive the organization.

A Servant leader completely transforms an organization which results in the establishment of trust within team members and effective management & allocation of resources in favor of the organization.

 

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Leadership-Build More Leaders

Leadership-Build More Leaders

The purpose of true leadership is not to maintain followers but to produce leaders. The above line sums up the whole purpose of leadership. You cannot convince me that you are a leader and say that you do not have a plan for your succession. Coaching & Mentoring are an integral part of your success as a leader. Your responsibility as a leader is to produce people better than you. Coaching & Mentoring practices focus on self-development. And coaches and mentors, too, are expected to be in a perpetual state of learning.

·         Put people first: When you decide to build people, your objective must also be to put people first. Shortsighted leadership focuses primarily on the bottom line. It’s not that the profits are not important—they are. But when they become the primary focus of a leader, then it inevitable results in self-interest and not in the interest of the team or the organization.

Sometimes, it may even cost you with some of your resources in developing people but it’s fine as long as you have made a decision to compromise on your bottom line in order to build effective leaders.

·         Character: Most leaders place their value on the vision of the organization and sometimes even ignore the role of a strong and genuine character in their personal life. Character is however, more fundamental and essential to accomplishing your organizational vision. Character affects how we interact with people around us. It influences to a high extent the kind of people we choose to surround ourselves with.

George Washington is reported to have said, “Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.’ Why is this important? Because your character is who you are. And if you don’t have a reputable character as a leader, you cannot expect others to follow you and help them become better leaders. For that to happen, you need to have a good, genuine and noble character.

·         Accountability & Trust: A leader must be accountable to a higher authority other than himself. He or she must submit to that authority without any terms or conditions in any situation. And this accountability is the prerequisite to building trust.

When you are accountable to yourself, to the people you lead and a higher authority, then people eventually place trust in you. Trust is a natural product of being accountable. If your desire is to build leaders, you need to be a good and reputable leaders yourself first and build the trust among your followers to transform them into leaders.

·         Leadership Attributes: Leaders attributes are an obvious quality to a leader who is looking to build or mentor leaders. Leadership attributes include demonstrating courage; keeping others focused on the organization’s vision & mission; exercising faith, and always willing to examine and change paradigms. True leadership often comes on to the frontline when it’s necessary to hold up some decision even when others disagree.

·         Influence & Impact: Mentor leaders look for opportunities in life to make an impact, because these opportunities to make difference in the lives of others will always be present. When you are a leader, you already have the positional advantage to influence others. Too often I hear people say that they will make a difference—later. They have a belief that they can change things once they have more time or once they have accomplished more. And therefore, they have a mentality that mentoring & coaching is only for experienced people. Don’t let your age – either young or old or your experience, or the call of success get in the way of your mission to touch the world for good. As a leader, you are obligated to help your people and make them better leaders for tomorrow. But you need to start somewhere. Just start and try to learn from other leadership models that produced great results.

·         Lead with example: What could be the best way to develop leaders other than letting them follow on your own footsteps? There are mainly two kinds of leaders. One who say things, but do not really practice the same in their own life. Then there are those who live the words they speak. I don’t need to ask you which of the two will have more influence on you? Obviously, the former kind of leader will have influence but that influence will be short lived. The simple truth behind that is : you are known for your Actions & not just for your words.

Mentor leaders are known by their legacy. If you want to build leaders who will be known for their commitment to the beliefs and values of the organization, you too must have to live your life In a way which reflects the same. For that, examine yourself and ask yourself: Am I consistent with my words? Am  I consistent with my actions? Am I consistent with my beliefs, values and standards? When you are consistent with the above traits, people will follow you and work on the principles that you live on and become much better leaders.

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Choose the Right People!

Choose the Right People!

One of the significant factors that contributes to high performance of a business portfolio, athletes, artists, or any other field for that matter, is the impact of the people that they surround themselves with. There are tons of people who are exceptionally talented with unique gifts but they never are able to release them because they arose from a part of the society where their talents were not appreciated or realized to even exist. Just think about it for a moment, if a particular environment or section of society doesn’t value some specific things, you naturally won’t be rewarded for your accomplishments however great they may be. But if you release your gifts to a place where people genuinely value your contribution because they need it, they would naturally reward you following the laws of economics.

Consider a colony who is fed and completely dependent on its ruling kingdom. The subjects living in that colony are oppressed by the rulers, but if collaboration of people results into a movement that liberates the subjects from the oppressive policies of the government, then you would be convinced that the people will value that movement or that people who collaborate to solve the issue. Now, if the same group of people advance in a democratic civilization, they wouldn’t be valued and exactly rewarded as they were in the former scenario.

In other words, even though you are carrying something which is valuable and can help people relive some kind of problems, still it does not guarantee that they will completely receive it. Because it also depends on the needs of the person at the receiving end. You might even end up squandering your valuable time, energy & put it into action to build something but if the receiver doesn’t demand or value it then your effort or time has no value at all!

The whole point of the above discussion is that you might have been with people all those years who told you, “You are nothing”, or “You can’t do this” or “You will never amount to something: and some of you might have even got discouraged and frustrated by these people’s remarks but still continued to associate with them or used most of your time to get their attention. But you need to understand from the above concept that not everyone can truly embrace or understand your worth. So, if you keep associating with such kind of people, even though you may not feel it but you slowly tend to lose trust in yourself that is your Self-Confidence. And the less you trust yourself, the more you will be persuaded and even coerced by other people.

Its also been seen that in case of professional athletes, the performance of an athlete changes dramatically when they get a spouse or make a friend. And most of the part on his/her coach. Yeah, we all know that stuff. But the major difference arises how the coach treats an athlete. Some coaches keep pointing out the mistakes without even bothering to suggest corrective measures. And this behavior arises partly because some coaches may consider the player overconfident or boastful and some of the coaches inculcate this behavior to feed their own ego. A good coach however, would not abstain from reflecting the mistakes but also facilitate correction and tries to understand the player’s uniqueness. And that is what makes all the difference.

The people you choose to use your time, determine the level of your motivation and your work ethic. If you associate with people who are given away to drunkenness ( not specifically alcohol but referring to anything that disturbs your mental faculty) , who are always complaining, or sluggards, then you can’t work with efficacy in that particular environment.

So, its important for you to choose the right people for you. Because life is not an experiment. You can’t keep experimenting with people for years and then decide whether you should live with them or not. It should straight away tickle you by analyzing their interests and most importantly their character. You can always tell what a person is like by the people he keep friendship with. The people you choose will be responsible for your intellectual growth, your finances, your character, your interests and eventually your destiny. You might end up being depressed & frustrating believing the shit people tell you and just get away with living an average life with average expectations getting average results. But if you live with people who always encourage you to push your limits, believe in yourself and helps you to become a better person then trust me, you will get through any circumstance in lie. What kind of people do you choose for your life?

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The Power of an Idea!

 

The Power of an Idea!

The Power of Ideas

Do you know that the world is ruled by Dead people? Yes! The world is the way we see it now is actually shaped & influenced by the people who are DEAD. Almost every system that operates on this planet governs on the principles that these Ancient people established. But how can someone rule the world without even being present in it? Why is it that the world is ruled by people in the cemetery? And the answer is not because they were powerful, wealthy or masters of the art of persuasion. Its because they influenced their contemporary world with their Ideas.

Ancient is so subtle that you do not even realize when you are under its influence and yet when that idea keeps multiplying, it manifests & metamorphoses itself into something what we usually call a Trend. And once this trend goes deep into the psyche of certain group, we call it a culture. Matter of fact, everything that you can see and cannot see was once an idea from the pencil on your desk to your electronic devices. All of them were an idea which got manifested at some point.

The Power of Ideas

Even the cultural clashes or the abuse on grounds of ethnicity or religion is an idea. Some groups somehow got an idea from an unreliable source that are better than the other group or they were bron to dominate the other group. They believed that their purpose was to oppress certain groups which they considered to be inferior than themselves. Now, due to this idea, they formed a concept which is actually a misconception of human misjudgment. Then their concept became their belief system. And their belief system led them to influence the nations.

When you read about Adolf Hitler, you would find out that the destruction that he caused to millions of lives started from a single idea which perhaps came from the wrong source. And this idea led to his misconception that God favors certain groups of people while others should be persecuted if they do not belong to that section of society.

The Power of Ideas

Still not Convinced? Okay. Let’s see a much more relevant example. We all live in Democratic Societies (hopefully). But the word ‘Democracy’ is actually a Greek Idea. Greeks invented this idea of ‘Demokratia’ where ‘demos’ refers to citizens and ‘kratos’ means to rule. When the Roman empire invaded the Greece, they demolished everything except the concepts of Greeks. So they put this Greek idea of “Democracy” into effect and now almost the whole world is governed by this idea that a few men created.

The Power of Ideas

This is why ideas are the most powerful thing in the world because ideas do not die with death. They keep perpetuating themselves even after that person’s demise. So the whole content about it is: where do you get your ideas from? Where do you form your philosophy of life? Where do you get information about sensitive topics that is available cheaply all over the Internet? The source of your ideas is important than the idea itself. You need to check the source which forms your ideology because that will form your reality. You need to keep check on people who influence you the most and contribute to a large amount of your Ideas. Share your Ideas below!

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