Building on the previous chapter, your primary purpose as a boss is to get the best from your team. If Chapter 9 was focused on what you do as a boss to motivate and inspire those around you, this chapter shifts the emphasis to what your team members do. In other words, it is about how you structure their roles and responsibilities and define the appropriate interventions so that they can work to the best of their abilities.

It is often said that managing others is an “unnatural act” – that is, it requires us to behave in ways that don't come easily to us. Many managers are promoted through the organization because they are high performers. They did their previous job well, they delivered results, and they enjoyed the praise and recognition that came with success. But as soon as these people are given significant managerial responsibilities, they are expected to develop a completely different set of skills – for example, delegating interesting projects to others, putting them in the spotlight and praising them for doing a good job, and investing time more generally in the “people” rather than “task” aspects of work.

It should be no surprise that many managers struggle with this transition. Learning how to get work done through others takes time, and many managers never master skills such as effective delegation. When you see a dysfunctional workplace, a common root cause of the problems is senior managers who insist on being involved in everything because they haven't understood the basic principles of delegation and accountability. As noted by management thinker Charles Handy, you should never steal someone else's decisions.

This chapter provides some specific advice on how to get the best from your team. We start by describing practical tips for delegating effectively (#55). Then we provide a useful framework (RACI) to help you clarify who is accountable for what (#56).

These techniques focus on specific roles and responsibilities. We also provide three techniques for improving how you relate to others. Giving people effective praise and recognition (#57) for doing a good job is a well-established way of enhancing their self-esteem and encouraging greater effort in the future. Building the self-confidence of team members (#58) is a broader set of techniques for developing the skills and motivations of those around you. Finally, we describe Heron's six categories of intervention (#59), a framework that helps you think about the right ways to support individuals in your team, depending on the specific circumstances they are facing.

55. Delegate Effectively

Delegation is one of the most important skills you need to develop as a manager. There are only so many hours in a day, and there's only so much work that one individual can do. As your career advances, you become responsible for getting more and more done, and beyond a certain level, the only way to do this is to delegate significant chunks of work to other people.

There's another reason why delegating effectively is good practice: namely, that it is good for the people who work for you. Most people crave some level of control over their own work. Or to put it the other way around, constant micromanagement from above, with the boss overseeing your every move, is annoying and demotivating. Delegation, when done well, is the best means of giving people the autonomy they desire. It allows them to use their intellect and their skills to deliver strong results that make the best use of their strengths.

So if delegation is so important, why do people struggle with it? First, it's a skill, and like all other skills, you need to work at it. Second, you, as the person delegating a job, remain accountable for its successful delivery. This means that you need to build up trust that the person you're delegating to will do a good job, and this takes time.

The starting point for delegation is to look at the work that you do and think about what you can delegate. Keep an activity log (#8) for a couple of weeks, and then review it to see which tasks you could delegate. Think about which members of your team you could delegate these to – you should look for someone who can get up to speed on the necessary skills quickly, and who has the time and motivation to do the job well. (If several people have the necessary skills, delegate the work to the person at the lowest level; otherwise, you'll overload your highest performers with mundane jobs.)

Then, discuss with them what you want them to do. Agree and document the following:

1. The outcome you want to see and how this contributes to the team's mission.
2. The authority level they have. Should they follow precise instructions? Should they recommend a course of action and get it approved by you before going ahead? Should they do what they think is right and then report results, or should they just get on with the job?
3. The resources, support, and training available to them.
4. The goals and deadlines they need to work to.
5. When you will meet to review progress.
6. Any boundaries for the task – things they must not do.

Keep in mind that when you first delegate to someone, the work will take longer to complete than you normally expect it to, and it will rarely be done exactly as you intended. (Be canny about this, and quietly build time for any rework needed into any project schedule that you have agreed upon.) But by providing feedback, you will see quicker and better results the second or third time around. With each successful iteration, you will be able to trust the person more and need to monitor him or her less. But remember that you are ultimately accountable for the successful delivery of the task – you can't abdicate responsibility for getting it done well.

56. Be Clear About Who Is Accountable for What (The RACI Matrix)

The issue of accountability becomes particularly important when you delegate work to a team of people. It's easy for even highly motivated, hardworking people to get muddled over who is accountable for delivering the task. If people are very busy, they often assume that others are taking care of particular details, meaning that no one attends to them and the delivery fails.

This is why you need to be completely clear about who is responsible for what when you delegate a task to multiple people. The RACI matrix is a useful way of defining the different roles people play around a given task or project:

• Responsible – These people do the work needed to deliver it. Multiple people can be responsible.
• Accountable – An individual owns the task and “the buck stops” with her and her alone. She is responsible for making sure that the task happens, and she signs off on its successful completion.
• Consulted – These people need to give input into the task, and the accountable people need to make sure this consultation happens.
• Informed – These people need to be kept up to date on progress, but they have no other role in the delivery.

You can use the RACI matrix to break down a task into subtasks and then identify who is responsible and accountable for each of these. Figure 10.1 shows a sample RACI matrix for a marketing campaign.

Here, Lakshmi is the senior stakeholder who commissioned the campaign – he needs to be consulted over the concept and plan, and he needs to know that the project is being delivered with the right level of quality. Michelle is the marketing manager and is accountable for the successful delivery of the campaign. Juan is a sales manager and will be delivering the campaign's webinars, and Elena is a marketing executive supporting it. By mapping the campaign in this way, it is clear who is responsible for what, and it confirms what Michelle and Juan are individually accountable for.

57. Give Effective Praise and Recognition

Another way you can help your people flourish is to give them effective praise and recognition. As managers, we often focus on negatives – identifying problems and fixing things that are going wrong. There is a good, historic explanation for this. Humans evolved in an environment where we needed to focus our attention on every tiny warning indicator around us so that we could survive. As a result, our brains are “wired” to focus on negatives.

But to be effective as managers of others, we need to take their needs into account, and often that means doing things that don't come naturally to us. One such example is providing positive reinforcement, praise, and recognition to those who are doing a good job.

All of us love well-deserved praise, even if we sometimes feel a bit embarrassed by it. Praise causes a neurotransmitter called dopamine to be released in our brains – it gives us a warm glow of satisfaction when we achieve a goal and again when we receive recognition from someone else for having achieved it. We want to get that feeling again!

Think back to your own experience of receiving sincere praise, perhaps from a teacher or a manager. How did you feel about that person? And how much harder did you work for him or her? The research firm Gallup has identified significant increases in helpfulness, cooperation, punctuality, attendance, and length of service associated with receiving regular praise.

In contrast, recall a manager who gave little praise. You probably felt unappreciated, you were less than happy, and you may not have performed to the best of your ability (there are exceptions, but research shows that this is true for the majority of people).

So even if you received little praise yourself as a child, make sure that you give plenty of it now. Make it a practice when you walk around to keep an eye out for things going right, and make sure you compliment people sincerely when you see such things. Be specific about what you're praising, and do it in an appropriate way (some people love public praise; others are embarrassed by it and would prefer to hear your compliments in private).

58. Build Team Members' Self-Confidence

One of the benefits of honest praise is that it improves a person's self-confidence. This in turn affects how happy they are, how much initiative they show, and whether they stick with a problem until it's resolved. Clearly, this is a key difference between success and failure for many tasks.

We looked at the importance of personal self-confidence in #4, and we saw the difference between self-efficacy, which relates to a specific type of work, and self-esteem, which is a more general sense that we can cope with what's going on in our lives.

You can help your team members develop self-confidence in much the same way you do for yourself. In other words, you can help them understand and capitalize on their strengths, set clear goals for the future (including ones that will build these strengths), reflect on their successes in the past, and build the skills and connections they need to be recognized as the right person for the job. There are other things you can do as well; for example:

1. Create “mastery experiences” for them. Set small goals that allow them to demonstrate to you and to themselves that they have mastered a skill. Then set progressively harder challenges to help them develop their skills further.
2. Give them the training and information they need to succeed. Teach them the right way to do tasks, and make sure they have the information and equipment to perform them successfully.
3. Pair them with experienced role models. As we saw in #49, people learn a huge amount by watching how skilled, successful people deal with problems and issues. Pair new, inexperienced, or underconfident people with good role models so that they can learn from them and get the coaching and guidance they need to become more confident.
4. Encourage them. Tell them when they've done a good job, and make sure to express faith in their abilities when they're struggling.
5. Provide an environment in which they can succeed. Allow them to develop new skills without distractions; and manage the amount of pressure they face, so that they have enough to motivate them to do a good job but not so much that they “fall apart” under it. (See the inverted-U model in #17.)

59. Support Your People Effectively (Heron's Six Categories of Intervention)

There are many ways you can support your people, from offering encouragement, as we saw above, to providing a shoulder to cry on when things are going badly.

However, there's more that you can do, and this is where it helps to know about John Heron's six categories of intervention. These are:

1. Prescriptive – Give advice and direction, say how people should behave, and tell them what to do to solve a problem.
2. Informative – This is about helping people understand a situation – for example, by explaining the underlying principles behind a situation or by sharing an experience.
3. Confronting – This involves highlighting behaviors and attitudes that people may not have thought about and getting them to consider whether they are appropriate. It's also about helping people avoid repeating mistakes. We'll look at two tools for doing this in Chapter 12 – the SBI feedback model (#68) and the GROW model (#69).
4. Cathartic – Here, you help your team members express thoughts and emotions they may not have confronted in the past, you empathize with them, and you help them think about how they can deal with a situation.
5. Catalytic – This involves encouraging people to reflect on the situation and learn for themselves so they can become more self-directed in how they solve problems.
6. Supportive – Finally, supportive interventions build people's confidence by focusing on what they do well, giving honest praise, and showing that you trust in their abilities. This is all about encouraging people when they're struggling.

Clearly, the first three types of intervention are quite autocratic (Heron's authoritative interventions). Although the outcome may be positive, the person being helped can feel uncomfortable, and you may feel awkward using these approaches.

The second group of three (Heron's facilitative interventions) are about helping people develop their own solutions and become more autonomous as individuals. These are much gentler and easier to use, but sometimes they just don't do the job.

Don't back away from giving the “tough love” of authoritative interventions when you need to!

Other Ways to Get the Best from Members of Your Team

One important technique that narrowly missed being included in our top 100 was getting the right balance between laissez-faire management and micromanagement. Find out how to do this at http://mnd.tools/c10c.