What I am about to share with you might be the most powerful tool I have found in leadership.
Like many of the best coaching tools that I know, I first learned of this one from Steve Chandler.
A large part of the leaders role is to get people to follow, without having to micromanage.
Delegation is an important part of this. But most people who delegate set themselves up for failure.
How?
One Leader’s Attempt to Delegate
One of my clients took particular pride in is willingness to delegate. To hire someone and let them run.
But he wasn’t getting the results that he wanted. And he came to me asking why.
He told me about his most recent hire and all the things that the person was not doing. How he was frustrated, but he didn’t want to tell the person how to do his job.
I asked him if he was familiar with the distinction between expectations and agreements.
Expectations and Agreements, Compared
In almost any area of our lives, when we have a frustration with someone, it is often because they have violated one of our expectations.
The issue is that most of the time, it is an expectation we have never communicated.
Remember that we are all living in separate, internal, worlds?
How would someone else know what we are thinking, unless we have told them?
Just seeing this is a major “aha” for most people.
But there’s more.
Know Your Own Expectations First
My client was hiring people expecting that they would know what to do in their role without much guidance from him. And they did, but they were doing different things than my client expected.
My client didn’t know that he had these expectations—they were not explicit for him—until the new person started doing his or her job differently.
So the first step for my client was observing and documenting these expectations.
Problem solved, right?
Not so fast.
Explicit Expectations are Still Expectations
Even if you get really clear on what you expect from someone, and you document it, you don’t actually have an agreement.
Agreements are based on conversation. Agreements result in buy-in from both parties.
Without buy-in, greater detail on expectations really doesn’t help.
What Are Agreements?
Agreements look something like this—
CEO: “Our investors expect sales to grow 50 percent this year, and I am counting on you and your team to deliver that.”
CRO: “I’d like to talk about that. We don’t have the bandwidth to build the pipeline and have all the meetings that would be necessary to close that kind of business.”
CEO: “Hmm. Tell me more. What would you need from me to be able to commit to that kind of increase?”
CRO: “I have some ideas. One would be another senior sales resource. Another would be…”
CEO: So if I were to give you those resources, you would be willing to commit to a 50 percent increase?”
CRO: “Absolutely.”
Now this is a much longer conversation, but you get the idea.
And sometimes the leader will require her team to stretch, without all the requested resources.
But the key thing is that everyone feels heard. Everyone feels included. And everyone is, to a much greater degree, committed to delivering a result.
This does not happen when the leader simply declares.
When possible, agreements are set in writing, with specific timing and deliverables, and both parties are involved in creating the document.
This is what means to “give ownership.” You AGREE both to the terms and the deliverables. And if you do it right, the person you have given the ownership to is as excited to take it on as you are.
Want to Know More?
Getting clear agreements is one of the things that will make the most dramatic different in your results as a leader.
If you’d like to dive deeper, I will be spending two days with a group of leaders in Denver on October 20-21.
The event is filling up fast. DM me if you are interested in hearing more.