People Management, Pt. 2 – Taking Ownership

Published on 31 July 2024

The other area that I want to focus on. Is the issue of having the people, but not being satisfied with the quality of the work that they’re submitting. And it may be that you’re dealing with people who really you can’t work with, but in many cases, that is not the situation at all. In many cases when you have someone who you’re delegating work to, and they’re not meeting your level of expectation for whatever reason, maybe they’re not doing thekind of work that you’re expecting them to do or they’re not meeting their time commitment.

They’re not getting the work in on time. Often the problem is not with the person you’re delegating to, who I shall refer to now as the delegatee. But the problem is often with the delegator, the person who is giving the work. The reason for this is delegators often have, I think, misplaced expectations about what they can expect from the delegatee.

if someone is not giving you the quality work that you’re looking for, it may be that you are not clear enough in describing what your expectations are about the kind of work that you’re looking for. If they’re not getting the work to you in a timely manner, maybe you have not trained that person sufficiently and made it clear how important meeting deadlines is to you.

You have to have a discussion about the importance of meeting deadlines and what it means not only to the person handling the work, but what it means to you personally and what it means to the client to get things done on time. One of the ways that you solve these problems of not getting quality work is to embrace a philosophy that I call ownership.

The idea is that you want people that are doing the work for you, whether it is the staff or whether it’s your colleagues or associates, whoever it is you’re delegating work to, you want them to develop a sense of ownership for the work they’re doing. When people take on this feeling of ownership, they become more excited about doing the work.

They put more of themselves into it. They think about it more. They’re more enthusiastic about it. They’re more conscientious to detail because it’s a reflection of who they are as a person. It’s very different from a scenario where you are just dumping work on people and telling them to do it, which I like to refer to as dumpigation as opposed to delegation. When you just dump work on people instead of taking pride instead of taking ownership in the work, they resent it.

They may feel that they can’t do it, so they may actually go out of their way to put off doing it. And when they get around to doing it, they don’t put their full hundred percent effort into it because they resent it because they don’t feel a sense of ownership. So the solution to getting people to do things on time and to do things in a way that you want them to do it is to help them embrace the sense of ownership. One solution is to start bringing people in earlier. A classic delegation technique is for you to talk with the client or talk with the customer, write down everything that you need to know about the situation, and then you go to the person you’re delegating to and re-explain everything to them.

So this creates two problems right off the bat. one, it’s a huge waste of time because now you’ve spent time learning about the situation and deciding what you think is the appropriate approach. And now you’re repeating all of that, and you’re trying to help this other person understand everything that you’ve learned in the initial conversation.

So the solution to that problem is to bring people in early, bring them in during the conversation with the client. You could literally say to the client, by the way, we’re delegating, I’m delegating this to someone who’s going to be helping me work on this. Rather than my having to explain all of this later, let me bring them in right now.

And so you find that person and you may have to have an agreement with that particular person you’re delegating work to that when you have a meeting with a client, that those are the kinds of things that take priority. And so you have an understanding that they will now come into the meeting with you and assert their authority from the very beginning.

They could be asking questions. They could be giving their thoughts about their experiences and the best way that they know to handle the situation. But they take ownership of the matter that you’re discussing. So you bring people in early, and you give them the authority to run the meeting.

Another way of helping people take ownership is to encourage them to ask questions of you. So as you’re discussing the matter that you’re working on instead of simply, dumping it on them and telling them this is what I want you to do, you encourage them to ask questions and give their thoughts and their input.

And as they do this, you would reward them by saying that’s a good question. I’m glad you thought of that question. And as they give their advice, you say that’s a very good suggestion. I appreciate that advice. You may not necessarily believe that these questions are good, but again, you’re embracing this philosophy of ownership and you’re using delegation as a training tool.

So by encouraging people to ask questionsthey’re ultimately going to come up with better and better questions and as they come up with ideas, they’re going to come up with better ideas. If you disagree with something that they say, you could respond by saying, I appreciate that advice, and I could see why you would think that, but let me suggest an alternative and let me explain to you why this approach, this alternative approach might be better. So the idea is that you encourage them rather than saying that’s a stupid question or why would you ask that question or rolling your eyes and being sarcastic and difficult, because what does that do? When you’re sarcastic, and when you’re critical, does that encourage people to want to come up with more questions?

And does that encourage people to embrace the matter and take ownership? No, of course not. What it does is it threatens them and it makes them feel less inclined to help out and more resentful of you and more resentful of having to take on this work when they could be doing something that they would enjoy doing much better.

If you want people to take on ownership, then you’ve got to encourage their questions and you’ve got to encourage the advice that they’re giving, even though you may not agree with it initially. So you encourage questions and you encourage advice.

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