Delegation for Consultants (with a minute to spare)
This episode delves into the critical topic of delegation within the consulting profession. Ian & Mike examine the significance of delegation as a fundamental skill that not only enhances management efficacy but also contributes to the overall success of consulting teams. Through our discussion, we elucidate the complexities surrounding effective delegation, addressing common pitfalls that impede the process and exploring the profound impact that proficient delegation can have on team morale, client satisfaction, and individual career development. Furthermore, we present our unique "one minute treatment," which distills the essence of delegation into actionable components that can be swiftly grasped and implemented.
Transcript
Foreign Consulting for Humans, a podcast all about life in consulting.
Speaker B:You're with Ian and with Mike, and.
Speaker A:In each episode, we'll be shining a light on a new topic that gets to the heart of what makes consultants happy and successful.
Speaker B:On the Consulting for Humans podcast, it's our mission to add just a little more humanity to the lives of consultants.
Speaker B:We also love to bring some of the skills and perspectives of consulting to human lives too.
Speaker A:So if you're a consultant who's trying to be more of a human, or even a human who's trying to be more of a consultant, then we think you're just our kind of person.
Speaker A:And we're so happy to have your company.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Welcome aboard.
Speaker B:In today's episode, we're looking at delegation in consulting and we'll be giving it our famous one minute treatment.
Speaker A:Excellent.
Speaker A:We do want to take a moment at the beginning here to welcome any luminaries listeners to the first of our consolidated episodes.
Speaker A:We have folded together Consulting for Humans and our special Luminaries tier.
Speaker A:And as we said last time, starting with this episode, we're going to have one longer Consulting for Humans episode every two weeks.
Speaker A:And each of these episode is going to include some of our traditional humans content and some of the deeper dives that we might traditionally have put into the luminaries via the paid tier.
Speaker A:So welcome one and all.
Speaker A:Let's hope we can all get along.
Speaker B:So in episode 14, we talked about the book the One Minute manager and its one minute goals.
Speaker B:In episode 19, we returned and applied the same treatment to consulting scope.
Speaker B:And in our last, last episode, we gave consulting recommendations the One Minute Treatment.
Speaker B:Today, delegation takes its turn.
Speaker A:This is a different kind of a topic for us.
Speaker A:I think that we've often talked about ideas and skills and approaches that are important uniquely for consulting.
Speaker A:But this is starting to ring bells with me with regular kind of management training from generations ago.
Speaker A:So maybe we should ask ourselves before we get into delegation, why?
Speaker A:How come an apparently simple skill like delegation might turn out to be a topic for consultants?
Speaker B:I think it's a great question to ask.
Speaker B:After all, great delegation, not only just management 101, it's what makes the consulting bottom line work right.
Speaker B:Not to mention the traditional consulting firm up or out system, that kind of pyramid.
Speaker B:Here, it's too important not to get it right.
Speaker A:You would think so.
Speaker A:You would think so.
Speaker A:But it comes up time and again in leadership sessions and coaching sessions that we run with our clients.
Speaker A:So let's get into some of the fundamental reasons to begin with why delegation Might be important and in particular why good delegation might be important.
Speaker A:What have you got on your list there, Mike?
Speaker B:Ian?
Speaker B:I think one of them for me has always been this idea of skills development and career progression for folks up and down the ladder.
Speaker B:Without good delegation, that doesn't happen.
Speaker B:Sometimes this is training, a lot of times this is kind of apprenticeship.
Speaker B:But if you don't get to do them and under the watchful guidance, you're just thrown into the deep water and left to sink.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:And I think all of us who've managed to make it past, I don't know, six weeks into a consulting career can look back on things that we learned because we had the job passed down to us and we just had to sink or swim.
Speaker A:So there's something in it for people who need to learn.
Speaker A:I think there's something in it for people who need to lead as well.
Speaker A:Every time I've seen teams do a good job of delegation, one of the paybacks has been, but that the seniors, the senior managers or the partners are even higher up in the organization.
Speaker A:The higher ups get more time back, partly just more time back, period, but especially more time back to do more of the stuff that they really need to be focused on the senior agenda, the strategic agenda, thinking about what's going to happen next.
Speaker A:So good delegation gets better leverage, better focus for seniors, I think.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:And I think I always think back to that idea that says we're either completely inundated with work or we're out there trying to do business development.
Speaker B:So I'm thinking about consulting firms of different size.
Speaker B:And when you're always hands on, as you were just saying, as senior members, as people who are both selling and doing work and you're not delegating, you're really going to get to that feast and famine cycle pretty quickly, right?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:You get either saturated or completely left with an empty table.
Speaker A:I think there's something in here as well about jobs for people, about task matching aces in places.
Speaker A:As I heard somebody say, if you do delegation well, you get to hand the right work into the hands of the right person who's well qualified to do it and arguably will do a good job and maybe even enjoy the work, who knows?
Speaker B:Oh, and I think riding right on those coattails, you're going to improve team morale and engagement.
Speaker B:I'm not just doing always the same thing.
Speaker B:I'm learning and growing.
Speaker A:And I think anytime I've been in a project where this has gone well, there's one more constituency that's been made happy as a result.
Speaker A:Mike.
Speaker A:And that's clients.
Speaker A:I think clients get happier.
Speaker A:Clients get to see more quality work delivered in a more timely, more smooth way when the consulting team is delegating well.
Speaker A:And I think we tend to kid ourselves that the senior people need to hold on to work in order for clients to be happy.
Speaker A:And I really don't think that's the case.
Speaker A:So, Mike, given all of these benefits, given that we are supposed to be people who respond to incentives, we ought to be awesome at delegation because there's at least half a dozen really outstanding reasons there why consultants should be good at this.
Speaker A:But how is it in practice?
Speaker B:I think regardless of the level you're working at in consulting, there are a number of delegation problems that range all the way from things like clear task descriptions and expectations.
Speaker B:And one of the ones that always kills me is this insufficient context about the why behind tasks that used to kill me when I was on the one end.
Speaker B:And I think it killed me in a very different way on the other end from one of the stuff I got back and had to redo.
Speaker A:And I think part of that gets us into this idea of matching tasks to capabilities as well.
Speaker A:It's a really easy thing to do to assume that anybody who's in a consulting team ought to be able to do any job.
Speaker A:And we kind of fling work around.
Speaker A:Everybody is a universally flexible, universally fungible resource.
Speaker A:And depending on who they are and where they are and what stage they're at, that can be not the case.
Speaker A:And I've seen it go really badly wrong a few times.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And then I think there's another one of our continuums that's both end that we get wrong sometimes on here.
Speaker B:Either this.
Speaker B:Okay, I've turned it over to you, so I'm going to abandon you again.
Speaker B:You're off in the deep end.
Speaker B:Good luck.
Speaker B:Or I'm such a.
Speaker B:Well, we'll get into.
Speaker B:I'm such a.
Speaker B:There's so much micromanagement that it undermines your autonomy and learning.
Speaker B:So I think getting that balance right between letting you completely go and absolutely micromanaging you, that plays a big role here in why we get it wrong.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And we've said before consultants, we have a tendency to overlove our false dichotomies.
Speaker A:And I've heard senior people say, I can't delegate this work because I'm going to have to stand over their shoulder and tell them precisely how to do it.
Speaker A:You've presented yourself with a false choice.
Speaker A:There.
Speaker A:There's somewhere in between.
Speaker A:Mike.
Speaker A:As you say, micromanagement and abdication.
Speaker A:And I've seen this happen across the scope.
Speaker A:I've seen very junior consultants have a hard time getting work delegated to them.
Speaker A:I've seen project managers get stuck with really uneven, unmanageable distribution of their own work.
Speaker A:Either a crowd of overdue tasks in their inbox or just crickets for a while.
Speaker A:And I've also seen leaders end up really clearly not leading, not managing to model what good behavior looks like, not managing to actually cultivate skill in their and also not managing to do the kind of quality oversight that clients are counting on.
Speaker A:So there's all kinds of ways in which we can mess this up.
Speaker A:I can remember one particular time as a project manager messing this up by delegating the wrong thing.
Speaker A:A classic case of not matching the task to the person.
Speaker A:There was a colleague on my team, a consultant who was really good at completing.
Speaker A:She was the classic Belbin completer finisher and she was actually quite anxious about this.
Speaker A:I hadn't realized how big a part this played in her happiness with her work.
Speaker A:And I had delegated big hand, wavy, complex, poorly defined tasks to her because I thought she was senior enough and I thought she got it and I thought she'd do a great job.
Speaker A:But she didn't for quite a while in the first weeks of the project until I noticed that she was itching to get something finished.
Speaker A:So I delegated then a couple of shorter, more self contained tasks to her.
Speaker A:She rattled them off really quickly and then suddenly her confidence shot up.
Speaker A:She got unstuck, you might say, and did a fantastic job on the bigger tasks too.
Speaker A:I'm just thinking if only I'd had my own better insight and my own better delegation decision making at the beginning of that process, we could have had such a better time.
Speaker B:And one of the things for me, I talked about people who dump things on people without this context.
Speaker B:On the same hand, I wish some people, particularly junior consultants, would ask why ask clarifying questions?
Speaker B:Don't just take it and do what I used to do.
Speaker B:It's that idea of saying you could stay quiet and let people think perhaps you're foolish or you could open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Speaker B:I think so often we get hired in or we even at a more senior level start somewhere and we want to think I'm probably not as smart as everybody thinks I am, or I don't want them to think that I'm not.
Speaker B:So we fail to ask those things.
Speaker B:And this, it's just this whole matching thing Come back.
Speaker B:I had just moved over into consulting at a very senior position, but my work had been really in turnarounds and not in a formal traditional consulting house for a long time.
Speaker B:I also have a PhD in strategy.
Speaker B:So one of the partners came by and said, Mike, I've got a really important client, very important project.
Speaker B:I need a white paper on everything they need to know about strategy, really the history, current thoughts, the best you've got.
Speaker B:And I thought you got it because I'm relatively new here and I took my dissertation and everything I did for orals and everything and I turned it into a really magnificent book.
Speaker B:And he said, mike, I was looking for about a maybe two or three page white paper.
Speaker B:I'd sure love to have that week back.
Speaker A:I bet you still got a copy of the, of the tome somewhere.
Speaker B:Oh yeah.
Speaker A:And it's funny, we misjudge the scope of things both when we're receiving the work, having stuff delegated to us, I think when we are delegating as well.
Speaker A:I remember a couple of times working on big projects with big kind of panels of senior partners looking after the client relationship and they would completely forget that there was a world outside their own.
Speaker A:And they would go into a huddle with the client for like always the first half of the day, oh, where are the partners?
Speaker A:They're in a huddle with a client.
Speaker A:They would finally emerge from the huddle on this really big but also really time critical project and they'd start handing out tasks and sometimes the juniors wouldn't get the tasks until 3pm Their time, at which point the seniors are going shrug of the shoulders.
Speaker A:That's your day's work and you're going to have to get it done.
Speaker A:And the frustration of people thinking now I have to do a full day's work and I've been sitting kicking my heels.
Speaker A:I've certainly, I've gone from being abandoned to being overloaded in the space of one phone call.
Speaker A:It's really easy for us to lose perspective on what the delegated task means, whether we're the delegatee or the delegator.
Speaker B:It seems again, basics.
Speaker B:We're using these examples and everything and we think, wait a minute, there's this kind of process about deciding to delegate in the first place what and when and to whom and briefing, handing it over, checking in, reviewing and giving feedback.
Speaker B:These are not difficult concepts.
Speaker B:But some real experts have pointed at professional services specifically and said, no, there's a really deep rooted problem here.
Speaker A:There really is our favorite author, the most insightful writer I think that there is about consulting businesses.
Speaker A:David Meister wrote about the under delegation problem.
Speaker A:He called it the systemic under delegation problem.
Speaker A:Basically saying, Mike, that it's the very first of those steps, just the step of deciding what to delegate and to whom.
Speaker A:That's the point where lots of consulting businesses come unstuck because senior people don't want to let go of work or they let it go down to.
Speaker A:To the more junior staff piecemeal and they're making a big mistake.
Speaker A:There are penalties here.
Speaker A:There's first of all an economic problem that results from not passing work down the hierarchy.
Speaker A:Work is most profitable when it's done by the lowest hourly rate resource that can do a decent job at it.
Speaker A:And partners and senior managers hanging on to work always mitigates against that.
Speaker A:And it always gives you a penalty on your margin and on your budget.
Speaker A:It presents a cultural problem, like with expectations among the juniors that they're just going to be kept in the dark and fed with slide creation tasks at short notice.
Speaker A:It's also a growth problem because you can't grow the practice.
Speaker A:You can't stack projects up next to each other and operate them efficiently if you're bad at making the initial decision to delegate.
Speaker A:And I think, as we said earlier on, Mike, when we get it especially wrong, it becomes a work quality problem.
Speaker A:Even though partners and seniors tend to think that quality is helped by them keeping their hands on the work.
Speaker A:All of the evidence and all the thinking from David Meester says that's a mistake.
Speaker B:It's interesting, Ian, because I found that this was endemic in some places where I have worked.
Speaker B:But we figured out a real easy fix for this.
Speaker B:You just have to systematically have people not bill their time for all this ridiculous stuff that they're doing.
Speaker B:And somehow all our financials looked great, but the burnout, wow, that was a different story here.
Speaker A:That's the special source.
Speaker A:Get people to do work for free and not bill their time.
Speaker A:That's great.
Speaker B:All the way up and down.
Speaker B:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker A:Bless him.
Speaker A:As well as diagnosing the problem and really sticking his finger on it here.
Speaker A:David Mist has given us three things in his book Managing the Professional Service Firm, which by the way, is a must read if you are or one day want to be a partner.
Speaker A:Managing the professional service firm is like the basics for how a consulting practice works.
Speaker A:And he's got a whole chapter about under delegation and he's got three things that he thinks that we should be doing.
Speaker A:First of all, to go back to your point, Mike, about people doing Work apparently for free or with no internal cost.
Speaker A:Firms that avoid under delegation tend to be the ones that track project level profitability and they take it seriously.
Speaker A:They accept that the information might sometimes be a bit imperfect, but they track profitability, they track execution of hours versus what was in the plan, and they hold partners and principals accountable.
Speaker A:At a simple level, senior people cannot overinvest their own time without the project economics taking a hit.
Speaker A:And at the firm level, that also means that practices and teams get to look across the piece at which project and which kinds of behavior are having the biggest impact on the overall efficiency, the overall profitability, the overall learning and morale development of the staff as well, and also, by the way, client satisfaction.
Speaker A:And once you're tracking project profitability and taking it seriously, you get the world's simplest fix for chronic systemic under delegation, which is jack up the fee rates of the senior managers and the partners so that their projects take an even bigger hit when they hang on to work, which is.
Speaker B:Love it.
Speaker B:Love it.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Oh, that's brilliant.
Speaker B:It's interesting, Ian, because there was an old maxim that says if you don't measure it, you can't manage it.
Speaker B:And I think one of the things for delegation to work well is you've got to delegate to competent people.
Speaker B:When Maester steps in and says, track and reward competition coaching activities, it says you've got to make sure that seniors know what coaching really is, train them how to do it well, and reward the ones who get good outcomes as measured by upward feedback from consultants.
Speaker B:And this, I think, was huge for us.
Speaker B:I remember this as it takes too long to train somebody to do this.
Speaker B:And people say over and over again, I can't put my time in that.
Speaker B:I can't build that.
Speaker B:That's not recognized.
Speaker B:But what's killing me is that there's never anybody really good enough for me to pass my work on to.
Speaker B:What can you see the conundrum here?
Speaker B:You, you've met the enemy, it's yourself, it's ourselves.
Speaker B:You know, it's tracking and rewarding.
Speaker A:Very good.
Speaker A:And I think a culture of saying everybody is expected to be good at coaching and everybody gets feedback on the quality of their coaching.
Speaker A:That's a culture that can really grow.
Speaker A:And I think it's surprisingly difficult to get to that consistently.
Speaker A:And I think that the final thing that came out of David Meester's chapter that I keep coming back to is taking scheduling and staffing seriously, looking ahead and saying, okay, we have this new signed piece of work.
Speaker A:Who's going to staff it, or if I'm the manager or I'm the partner, how am I going to allocate my time?
Speaker A:And which bits of this am I going to share with juniors or even subcontractors?
Speaker A:Because it's funny, Meister doesn't often describe consultants as being very managerial.
Speaker A:He says that we're actually quite mavericks and we tend to resist management.
Speaker A:But in successful consulting practices, one of the few things that is genuinely done in a managerial way and having managerial effect is this business of allocating work to people.
Speaker A:So good firms take away from partners the ability to staff people on their own projects, and they have either a process or a person who is the resource manager or the resource management process that has the authority to outrank any individual partner or director and say, no, you've sold this work, Congratulations, here's the staff that we have for you.
Speaker A:Good firms can stick to that.
Speaker A:Unsuccessful firms are the ones where partners can always scramble to either get their favorites in or scramble to hold onto the work for themselves and just sit in the corner and basically eating whatever they've killed that particular day.
Speaker B:And it's funny, I've seen this in so many of our client organizations, I've seen it in so many places where I have consulted or coached to all of this advice from Maestro plays itself out.
Speaker B:I remember one firm where exactly as you were just talking about, everybody got their own people and they started to change this, but they weren't changing the coaching, they weren't changing the feedback.
Speaker B:And what you had was every time somebody got staffed on a new project, everybody, all the project managers did it their own way, all the partners did it their own way, and you spent all your time learning and relearning how this person wants it.
Speaker B:So it was, and it was an easy knock on delegation.
Speaker B:No, it doesn't work, doesn't happen.
Speaker B:And really it's systemic, as Mester said, bringing all these things together.
Speaker A:Yeah, it can be a strategic problem in the long term if the nature of the work that you're doing shifts.
Speaker A:So if you go from doing strategy work to doing more implementation focused work, the structure of a team changes.
Speaker A:And therefore, sometimes the structure of who you have in your resource pool doesn't match the structure of the work that you're selling.
Speaker A:But that's a strategic problem.
Speaker A:That's not a reason why delegation doesn't work.
Speaker A:It's not a reason why you've got the wrong resources.
Speaker A:It's the fact that you need to think again about how your resourcing pattern matches up to the work that you're selling.
Speaker A:Mike, since the essence of delegation ought to be easy and it's been known about and written about in business textbooks for decades and decades, how come do you think people end up in consulting, apparently smart people, and really having a hard time with doing this at all and certainly doing it well.
Speaker B:So I think a lot of times, Ian, it's a difference in mindset.
Speaker B:Mindset of how do I help versus how do I protect what's valuable about me.
Speaker B:People can say, as I've said a moment ago, the problem is the people who get assigned to my projects who don't know what they're doing.
Speaker B:Why is that?
Speaker B:Whose problem is it?
Speaker B:Where should a solution come from?
Speaker B:It's gotta come from me.
Speaker B:But some of those same people, instead of saying, how do I help, say how do I protect what's valuable about me?
Speaker B:I'm the one who delivers, I'm the one who gets credit.
Speaker B:I'm the one who really knows how to do this.
Speaker B:I'm the one who has the relationship with the client.
Speaker B:And I think some people, people even to the point of feeling there's a zero sum game for credit around here and that I've got to be the one with my fingerprints all over anything that's getting done and done well.
Speaker A:And I think that's a difference in the mindset that you might get by mistake if you came into consulting as an analyst and have stayed in consulting all the time, protecting your personal brand and nurturing your own little bit of fame there.
Speaker A:I think I've seen people come laterally into consulting who've worked in ordinary grown up organizations where we don't have fragile egos in quite the same way, actually find it easier to share credit around and therefore to share work around.
Speaker A:But I've seen people who've come all the way up through the analyst, consultant to director to partner, really messed up in many ways about who they are and what they're there for and have a really hard time, like you say, Mike, passing work on.
Speaker B:Ian, any advice that you'd have thinking about everything we've taken into account so far, what makes delegation effective, particularly in the context of consulting?
Speaker A:First of all, I think you've got to have a reasonably dispassionate conversation about the job and how complex it is and really who is qualified to do it.
Speaker A:We have a very high tendency to inflate our estimation of just how complex the task is.
Speaker A:So really, does it uniquely require your skills?
Speaker A:What are the consequences of some rework needing to be done.
Speaker A:What are the consequences of a small scale mistake?
Speaker A:What are the consequences of somebody doing it and taking 10 or 20% longer than you would take to do it?
Speaker A:I think sometimes we overanalyze the consequences.
Speaker A:So we need to get real and calm down a little bit about just how critical and urgent some of these tasks are.
Speaker A:What else do you think?
Speaker B:I absolutely agree with that.
Speaker B:And I think there's a little bit of a short term, long term, or even just a little bit longer term perspective.
Speaker B:What's going to happen if I, if there is a small hit here or a small hit there, that's just going to keep compounding itself.
Speaker B:Probably showing up in turnover over the long run because I'm not getting this person engaged and developed and this problem is going to keep on hounding me.
Speaker A:How about trying to close the gap?
Speaker A:So rather than thinking Joe or Josephine over here probably isn't up to it, so I'm going to do it myself, how about rethinking the task so that I can try to do this delegation in order that Joe and Josephine themselves increase their capability for the next time around?
Speaker A:Taking that long term perspective rather than just short term.
Speaker B:Yeah, I love that, Ian and I love the idea of perhaps revisiting our decisions.
Speaker B:Am I always delegating work in the same way?
Speaker B:Regardless of this situation, regardless of complexity, regardless of the expertise level in this case with this task, with this person, you know, how is the best way to do this and having a feedback loop to find out what's happening?
Speaker B:How can I become a better delegator?
Speaker B:How can I work with this person, work with that person?
Speaker B:The woman that went on to become CEO, chairman of the board of IBM.
Speaker B:I remember following years earlier into a team of different consultants, different consulting teams, inside one big corporate client of ours.
Speaker B:And it was one of my first times really spending any time with her.
Speaker B:And as we walked out, having visited team to team to then get to the complex sale we were trying to work on afterwards, she said, I guess I looked a little schizophrenic in there.
Speaker B:And I said, multiple personalities, I would say schizophrenics.
Speaker B:She said, let me tell you a little bit about those different teams and about some of the leaders and team members and why I had a different approach.
Speaker B:It was a great insight for me in somebody who was a real ace at matching the kinds of things you're talking about right there.
Speaker A:Really good.
Speaker A:So what do successful delegators do then?
Speaker A:Step one is they're good at understanding context for themselves and they're good at adapting and shaping the work that they pass on and the way that they do the handover.
Speaker A:I think great leaders who are good at delegation are also good at being respectful.
Speaker A:Like, they don't take their status as senior, they don't take it for granted, they don't claim emergency every time they delegate a task to somebody else.
Speaker A:They are a bit more cautious about saying, this is super urgent or this is super risky.
Speaker A:And I think as a result of that, when they're handing work over to junior or inexperienced people, they're smart about leaving a bit of a pad in there, leaving a buffer of time or scope or completeness so that there is going to be the chance to give some feedback and to do some coaching or to do some rework, because we all know in the long run, that's how people get better, that's how the whole firm advances.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's.
Speaker B:I love that, Ian.
Speaker B:And the idea that they always put the task in context, the bigger context.
Speaker B:Here's the what, here's the why of this, and here's why this is important.
Speaker B:So here's how what you're being asked to do relates to the bigger project.
Speaker A:And on a small scale, what we're doing when we delegate work is just the same as what clients are doing when they hand work over to us in a consulting project.
Speaker A:And I, I think the final thing that really great delegators do with junior or inexperienced people is that they give not only a deadline, but some guidance about timing and completeness.
Speaker A:So they'll say something like, here, please do this for me.
Speaker A:Take about X number of hours.
Speaker A:If you get to X number of hours and you haven't made much progress, come and see me because you'll be doing something that needs redirecting.
Speaker A:So giving those very crude kind of time and scope budgets is super helpful, especially for people who are on their first couple of tasks.
Speaker B:Boy, I wish I'd had that with that strategy paper.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker A:Wouldn't that have been helpful?
Speaker A:Mike, this almost sounds like scope and we've done one minute scope, so let's think about one minute delegation here.
Speaker A:What things do we need if we're going to try and delegate a task in our one minute time frame here?
Speaker B:We just named one of them, Ian.
Speaker B:A clear objective statement.
Speaker B:What needs to be accomplished and why?
Speaker A:Yep.
Speaker A:Then we need a specific, deliverable, very short, concise description of what the output's.
Speaker B:Going to be, a timeline and deadline when it's needed, and any interim checkpoints along the way.
Speaker A:So there's lots of ask and requirement.
Speaker A:We need to put something in.
Speaker A:That's an offer as well.
Speaker A:We need to give resources.
Speaker A:What are the tools, templates.
Speaker A:The people and advisors are information sources that the delegate team might need to do this job well.
Speaker B:And the delegate also needs to know about authority parameters, you know, what are their decision making boundaries, what do they need to seek approval on so they know when they can carry on and when they need to check back.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:So we're up to five boxes.
Speaker A:We've got a couple more to go.
Speaker A:Thinking about what the end could look like.
Speaker A:We need to give people some success criteria.
Speaker A:This is how I'm going to evaluate the quality of the work that you're doing for me.
Speaker B:Nice, nice.
Speaker B:The end in mind and a support mechanism.
Speaker B:How and when to seek help if needed.
Speaker A:And then finally a confirmation check.
Speaker A:This has been a one minute delegation conversation.
Speaker A:The last thing I'm going to do is double check to say how clear is this for you?
Speaker A:Are you ready to get started?
Speaker A:Mike?
Speaker A:Eight boxes sounds like a lot here for one minute.
Speaker A:Do you think we can get this in under a minute?
Speaker B:I'll tell you if the last two times we've done this are any indication, Ian, I'm going to feel better if I turn it over to you.
Speaker B:Let's say you've got a consulting manager to delegating a competitive analysis to a junior consultant.
Speaker B:What might that sound like given our eight box model here?
Speaker A:Excellent.
Speaker A:Here we go.
Speaker A:Let's start the clock.
Speaker A:Sarah, I need you to prepare a competitive analysis for the FinTech client by Friday 3pm that's the timeline.
Speaker A:The deliverable should be a three slide summary comparing our client's offerings to their top three competitors on pricing features and marketing positioning.
Speaker A:That's the delivery.
Speaker A:This is going to help the client understand their competitive advantage.
Speaker A:For the upcoming strategy meeting there's a little objective for you.
Speaker A:You can use the competitor analysis template in our project folder and access the market research reports we purchased last week.
Speaker A:Jason from the financial services team can answer technical questions about products.
Speaker A:That's the resources box.
Speaker A:You have flexibility in how you gather and analyze the data.
Speaker A:But please check with me if you need to contact the client direct.
Speaker A:There's our authority box.
Speaker A:The analysis should highlight clear differentiators and be backed by specific data points.
Speaker A:That's how we're going to measure success criteria.
Speaker A:Finally, I'm available for a 50 minute check in tomorrow afternoon if you feel you need guidance or sooner via Slack for urgent questions.
Speaker A:There's our support.
Speaker A:Final confirmation.
Speaker A:Does this make sense.
Speaker A:What challenges can you foresee in completing this by Friday?
Speaker B:Boom boom.
Speaker A:Mike.
Speaker A:Close enough.
Speaker A:I think close enough to a minute.
Speaker A:I love the one minute delegation.
Speaker A:There's a little bit of everything there.
Speaker A:Something for the delegator and something for the delegatee.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:And as we said, is that a script?
Speaker B:No, it is a formula that you would tailor, of course, to the delegation you're making as well as to the person you're talking with.
Speaker B:To delegate.
Speaker A:Exactly.
Speaker A:And you don't have to speak as fast as I do.
Speaker B:I thought you did it much better that way.
Speaker B:I think I tend to.
Speaker B:Shh.
Speaker B:I'm going against the clock and I'd hate to be on the other end of that.
Speaker B:But as a guy who listens to audiobooks at 3x speed, I think I'm just drifting into that territory too often.
Speaker A:We need to take a leaf out of somebody's book there.
Speaker A:So I think we've done a nice job so far covering delegation.
Speaker A:What are the pitfalls?
Speaker A:Why is it important in consulting?
Speaker A:What does it take for us to be successful and how do we do the one minute version of it?
Speaker A:And in all of the thinking and the reading that we've done around this delegation topic, we've come up against a related topic which is not only how do you delegate, but also how do you take care of something that as a senior, seems like it's about to be added to your agenda.
Speaker A:This is the old story of the monkey on your back.
Speaker A:And we're going to take a closer look at it right now.
Speaker A:Mike, I've heard about this having a monkey on my back thing a few times at different stages in my career.
Speaker A:Where does it come from originally?
Speaker B: hed in the November, December: Speaker B: Yeah,: Speaker A:Very good year.
Speaker B:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:So all our listeners can say that.
Speaker B: printed in November, December: Speaker B:And it was reprinted because it was tied as one of the two best selling reprints ever.
Speaker B:So this was.
Speaker B:We're going back a long way here, but this was the classic about delegation and about managers handling tasks that have become a burden and how they bring it upon themselves.
Speaker A:Good.
Speaker A:He has this idea of taking a task from somebody else or an obligation from somebody else means that the monkey is then on your back.
Speaker A:Now, if I remember right, this of course is not a consulting specific thing.
Speaker A:This is a general management skill.
Speaker A:But think about these three different kinds of manager time and think about them in the world of a consultant.
Speaker A:Oncken And Wass said that there were three kinds of time.
Speaker A:There was boss imposed time, there was system imposed and self imposed time, meaning work that was imposed on us either because we chose to discretionarily or because subordinates had come along and imposed stuff on us.
Speaker A:And this is sounding a lot like some of the different pulls and tensions on the time of a typical mid level consultant or a consulting project manager.
Speaker A:Having too much discretion, too much leeway means that you get subject to imposed time because people come along and you feel obliged to pick up their monkeys, to pick up their burdens.
Speaker A:And Stephen Covey did this response, Mike, and he was thinking some more about how we might think about a monkey and how we deal with it and what it means in terms of culture.
Speaker B:Yeah, back at the time 74, originally when uncle wrote this, it was pretty predominant command and control cultures.
Speaker B:So this idea of a subordinate imposing on me.
Speaker B: is Covey, Forward forward to: Speaker B:It's not just command and control culture.
Speaker B:Even in empowered organizations trying to be empowered, there's a little of that personal command and control we put into there.
Speaker B:So all these monkeys have jumped successfully from subordinates, if you will, other people's backs onto mine in the stories that they tell there.
Speaker B:It's not always managers having, if you will, being attacked by monkeys.
Speaker B:It's managers inviting monkeys on their backs for various reasons.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Covey says that actually managers and leaders, and by extension consultants, have this tendency to want to grab onto or even hold onto other people's monkeys, other people's responsibilities, because of this anxiety about credit and because of this anxiety about control.
Speaker A:That means that they never have time to tackle the bigger monkeys, you might say the gorillas that they should be looking after, that they should be solving or discovering on behalf of their firm or their clients.
Speaker A:So we start out taking a little monkey off the back of somebody else because it makes us feel better.
Speaker A:And we end up burdened with these really out of control monkeys, not getting time for our gorillas.
Speaker A:Mike, we might almost have stretched the monkey analogy beyond its ability to be stretched here, but let's try just a little bit more.
Speaker A:But in the one minute, manager meets the monkey, we got into some rules, right?
Speaker A:Rules for managing monkeys.
Speaker A:How do they go?
Speaker B:They said four rules.
Speaker B:Number one, describe the monkey.
Speaker B:So before ending a conversation about a problem or an opportun, identify the specific next move or task that need to be done.
Speaker B:So let's break this down a little bit.
Speaker A:Giving the monkey A name and a structure.
Speaker A:I like it.
Speaker A:That's a very consultant way of handling a monkey.
Speaker A:Rule number two, assign the monkey ensure that each task, or as you might say, each monkey is assigned to a specific person and that they accept responsibility for it.
Speaker A:Not all the monkeys need to be on my back, Mike.
Speaker B:Exactly right.
Speaker B:We decide which insures ensue and now task number three is to insure, insure the monkey depend how the risk associated with the task will be managed either by the employee recommending and then acting or ideally by the employee acting and then advising.
Speaker B:So this is saying again, having a bit of a hands off here and trying to develop people.
Speaker B:We'd really like them to take the initiative and go out and act and then advise.
Speaker B:But some folks need to be brought along here so they might want to run their recommendations by you first.
Speaker B:But when they bring that up, don't grab the monkey, let them run that by.
Speaker A:We're getting very Zen and detached about our monkey cultivation habits here.
Speaker A:We're describing it, we're assigning it, we're taking care of the risk.
Speaker A:Finally, we're going to check in, we're going to make sure that each other's monkeys are okay.
Speaker A:We're going to schedule regular catch ups to make sure that whatever monkey task we've passed around is progressing and that we're able to provide feedback and coaching.
Speaker A:So the idea of the monkey for the one minute manager is actually taking us back to another great picture of what good delegation looks like.
Speaker B:Well, Ian, we've got a really good look now at delegation, where delegation goes wrong, where it could go right here, even digging back to monkeys and monkeys through the decades here, that leaves us with some assumptions perhaps.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think this whole conversation is super useful but it does mean that we're making an assumption that delegation is about status, that delegation is only or entirely when somebody who's senior delegates to somebody who's junior superior delegates to subordinate.
Speaker A:And what we've said already about empowerment and about monkey, what's the word?
Speaker A:Monkey farming, that tells us that thinking of this as a one way transfer of authority is a bit of a one dimensional way of thinking about it.
Speaker A:Work is not a rare privilege to be clung onto.
Speaker A:Nor is it, as we've talked about with the monkey idea, a burden to be got rid of as quickly as possible.
Speaker A:Mike, we've talked a lot in a way that assumes that we're delegating, as you might say, downwards.
Speaker A:I think we might need to spend some time thinking about how you delegate upwards.
Speaker B:Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
Speaker B:Ian.
Speaker B:How do we delegate upwards?
Speaker B:That's an easy and smooth process.
Speaker B:Now, for many people it's not.
Speaker B:And that's exactly what we're going to talk about on our next episode.
Speaker A:So next time out, we'll be talking about delegating upwards, delegating to superiors and subject matter experts.
Speaker A:We hope that you've enjoyed the conversation about delegations this week.
Speaker A:We hope that you're going to go out and delegate something and absolutely smash it out of the park.
Speaker A:Thank you for listening.
Speaker A:We're looking forward to your company once again in a couple of weeks on the Consulting for Humans Podcast.
Speaker B:The Consulting for Humans podcast is brought to you by P31 Consulting.
