How to be a good employee (10 times the salary in 10 years) - Part 8: Let the bullets fly…

Photo by Trym Nilsen on Unsplash

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming here!

Two things happened recently at work where I could have delegated better. 

I felt quite bad about them at first.

But they turned out to be right decisions after a week.

Therefore, as a manager, try to delegate properly, but more importantly, do not feel bad.

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

1.I could have delegated

In drafting up a deck for the client, I discussed with the team and agreed on the storyline.

There were 5 slides that needed major work and 1 slide that needed adjustment.

3 of the 5 that needed major work would be hard to delegate, because I had all the information and background.

So there were 2 slides that needed major work and 1 slide that needed adjustment that I could choose to delegate.

There were 3 other members in the team.

I only delegated the 1 slide that needed adjustment to one team member and took the 2 that needed major work upon myself.

I guess I was partly trying to continue the work I had done on the 2 slides that needed major work and partly did not want to load the team more as I knew they were involved in other engagements too.

But afterwards, I regretted.

If I had delegated the 2 slides to the two other team members, there would be at least 4 benefits:

1. I would have less to do and could focus more on the 3 slides.
2. The workload of the team would be more even, at least from the perspective of this engagement. The team member that got assigned the 1 slide that needed assignment might feel a bit unfair in the current arrangement.
3. The deck would be more of team work, instead of my storyline and my deck.
4. If there would be needs for further changes to the deck, we could split the work more easily and deliver the update version faster.

I regretted over the weekend multiple times and could not help thinking about the benefits of better delegation.

In the beginning of the subsequent week, I managed to find time to complete all the slides. But I still felt bad.

However, after a few days, I found out that that could be the right decision.

One of the other team member got assigned to another engagement entirely. If I had assigned to him the one slide, I might have to take it back anyway, which would cause more interruption.

The other team member was entirely occupied on another stream of the engagement and she did not even bother me with it, probably partly due to that fact that I left her out of this stream to allow her more time to work on the other area.

Therefore, that decision could be the best one, in term of completing the work effectively without interruptions.

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2.I should not have delegated

The 2nd incident was even more straight forward.

I delegated some analysis to an intern and it turned out to be a bit complicated for her.

I had to spend more time training her than doing the analysis myself.

I regretted also. Why didnt I just do it myself?

However, I later found out that she could catch up much faster on the other analysis after the training. 

I guess the training enabled her to understand the methodology and my train of thoughts.

This is good and she is able to help me with more analysis, which definitely saved more time for me.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Summary

Delegation is as much science as art.

As a manager, try to delegate properly.

However, if some seemingly less ideal decision is made, do not feel bad.

Let the bullets fly…

You never know how it would turn out.

And we can always learn to improve!

Till next time!