EFFECTIVE DELEGATION ultimate communication toolkit

With a high IQ, there are few who can accomplish 'tasks' as well, but with a high EQ, studies show you may be 4 X as successful in business! With a high EQ, you’re already further ahead in the art than you think. So study quick those of you who are smart - I know you can tackle and accomplish these techniques if you put your mind to it! You guessed it, this is not your typical ‘how to’ delegation article that somehow got side-tracked to explain why you should delegate and how much more you could accomplish if you did. I know you already know that – you’re here to save time.

This hub then is to give you concrete suggestions and tools which you will instantly recognize as personally needed or not. The ones you need may seem too challenging to learn or take more effort than your desired time savings. If the latter be true, you can skip right to another CEO’s suggestion of giving the same task to a number of employees with the hopes that at least one of them will get it done – interesting concept. Most of us however, are not in the position to be that unproductive or wasteful of our company’s money.

Can you relate to wishing a genie would pop out and grant you the wish of a self clone (or two, or three)? In my late teens, I thought I 'had arrived' being lucky enough to be put in charge of a hotel project with a $4.5 million budget and over 50 people to help me. I had anticipated the difficulty of getting owners or presidents to take me seriously. The much tougher required 'art of delegation' completely surprised me. Too young and green to realize both challenges needed the same set of skills, I struggled continuously working up to 120 hours a week until completion only to collapse from total and utter exhaustion. Bottom line truth I had to find out the hard way: delegating requires greater leadership, communication, and people skills than simply giving the delegatee the proper outline, resources and support to get the job done.

Reluctant to state the obvious, the first thing that has to happen to get anything done: you have to want to. To delegate, they have to want to do it for you. If you’re a task oriented person, learning how to better understand and motivate people may seem uninteresting. I encourage you to listen to the first video posted. Recent statistics astoundingly show that a high EQ has proven to equate to greater success than being a ‘smarty’. As a Smarty, these techniques can be mastered but again, you have to want to. Sure, you can hedge your success by hiring people with the proper skills, but that only helps a little when human nature, emotions, and different motivators enter the mix. This brief outline of your toolkit will help you decide if you want to. 

 Toolkit outline \/

1) WHERE TO FOCUS & WHAT TO DELEGATE – for easy shifting

2) WHAT TO CONVEY & LAYING THE FOUNDATION – EQ & behavior keys

3) HOW TO ASK – for maximum reception & understanding

4) TEAMWORK & MOTIVATIONAL TIPS – IT IS NOT lonely at the top

Logic would seem to dictate that repetitive tasks are what we ought to delegate. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. As a leader, you need to clearly define where your personal gifts and talents are and focus fully on areas related to them. For example, as the Pres. or CEO, the vision and direction of your company is yours – you own it. Scoping out trends, your competitions’ moves, understanding your company’s place in the grander picture and what unique edge you can bring to the marketplace, societal changes and so on necessarily need your thoroughly involved focus and creativity.

You may also be the absolute best negotiator or salesperson to close on the deals that could make or break your or the company’s goals in our current economy. Of course, you may not need my help in this area but all too often I’ve seen this foundational understanding delegated, asking for mere empty figures, statistics and percentages – global advances and social understanding cannot be gained from mere stats.

The next section involves techniques about understanding people. The first place to start follows the wise adage “begin within”. When fully aware of your own behavioral tendencies and emotional intelligence, it becomes much easier to create a positive environment – light years more productive for everyone involved.

John Maxwell also reminds us beautifully and simply that, “Leaders in any organization must be the environmental change agents. They must be more like thermostats than thermometers…The attitude of the leaders, coupled with a positive atmosphere in the organization, can encourage people to accomplish great things. In addition, consistent accomplishment generates momentum. Many times momentum is the only difference between a winning, positive growth climate and a losing, negative [one]. Leaders cannot afford to overlook the importance of momentum.”

To build true momentum, I always remind myself of Winston Churchill’s picture of leadership: “Leadership is like a piece of string – push it and it goes nowhere, pull it and you can take it anywhere you want”. If you want people to care about doing something for you, care about them first.

Naturally, you want to convey your vision for why any task/action/project is valuable. Mission statements are the best way I have found to clarify the true essence of visions and goals. Even for the smallest projects, if you take a few moments to gain complete clarity yourself on how or why the project you want to delegate is an integral part of the whole, it will instill importance into the person who will carry it out.

Although written as though for only university students, all the tools on how to convey a message to an audience can be found at: ACE YOUR PRESENTATION by dispelling all fears. These can tremendously help when delivering an important message to anyone - for anything.

Another technique I’d like to recommend is to grab a simple version of Myers Briggs (or similar) behavioral study. There are many free tests and charts all over the Internet. This is a simple categorization of our foundational human behavior. Simplified, we all fit into 4 main categories with subtleties found in our own unique combinations thereof. I found a great link to make this a little easier to understand with humor:

A few, other than Myers Briggs = Four Temperaments ; Socionics ; Keirsey Temperament Theory ; Type A and Type B personality theory ; Humorism and color preference tests they use in Europe before even hiring someone…

Now, let’s get into where the rubber meets the road. After the hotel project as a teenager, I spent the better part of a few decades to learn and improve on the fundamentally essential skills I lacked – be patient with yourself. I continue to research and train myself to allow e-motions to be the energy that moves my life. Am I suggesting you feel free to release your anger and slug your employee or co-worker? Quite the contrary > EQ= Emotional Intelligence.

A definition on EQ.org: “Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive emotions; to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought; to understand emotions and emotional knowledge; and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth.” (see source on link) Plus, they recommend a book called, “Learned Optimism” by Martin Seligman, Ph.D.

One of my own favorite authors is Marianne Williamson: From “A Woman’s Worth” through “A Course in Miracles”, I walk 10 feet off the ground after reading every time!

Here are a few simple techniques that have helped me:

A: Gratitude breeds abundance – in ALL areas! They say it takes only 21 days to change a habit. I made it easier for you: Gratitude Log 21 days to more abundance - easily steer yourself onto a path of greater joy & abundance.

B: Your Jimminy Cricket may be a pessimist: Positive affirmations have healed me from diagnosis of a disease they said was “incurable”, and another that millions struggle to defeat daily. Never underestimate the power of stopping that negative voice inside that may try to convince you how defeated you must be. It may attempt to keep you in judgement, or uselessly worrying about things that will never happen, or looking at the half empty portion of the glass.

C: Exercising and displaying the value of this poster helped me get and survive the hotel project despite my incompetence in other areas: see smile poster \/

Noticing and genuinely complimenting a person when they do things ‘right’ – before any personal agenda, will stack the odds in your favor tremendously! The next section offers a powerful way to communicate and instill your compliments in peoples’ minds for life!

“You can lead a horse to water…” and he will drink every time if you make sure to feed him salt first J. This is easier than it sounds. More often than not we tend to jump right in and start telling someone something, or asking them to do something without building their curiosity first, or letting them know why we’re going to tell them or ask them to do something without communicating the ‘why’ of its importance – for them. Taking a moment to make someone want to hear what we’re about to say, building them and the proposal up first to gain their full attention will produce huge results!

Gary Smalley seems to have coined the phrase “emotional word pictures” although he doesn’t claim to have done so. He is however the person who seems to be spending time to promote and popularize it well. He has mastered how to communicate and thus I’d like to give him the credit he’s due. Getting his material will change your life! (See sidebar)

Five reasons why word pictures work:

[1] Word pictures are used by the world’s greatest communicators.
[2] Word pictures grab and direct attention.
[3] Word pictures bring communication to life.
[4] Word pictures lock thoughts into our memory.
[5] Word pictures provide a gateway to deeper, more honest communications.

We have all used this technique without naming it. It is communicating in a way that instantly connects both sides of our brain - our emotions and intellect while seeming to put our memories in a very high absorption mode.

Concisely, the way to use emotional word pictures is first to be clear about your purpose – what you want to accomplish with your communication. Second, after studying the person and their interests or history, use your imagination to create a story THEY can relate to. You can use common objects, events they are involved with, Nature or “remember when” from a story you know they felt deeply about. Then pick a time and place (don’t forget to bring your salt) with few or no distractions to share it with them.

Knowing yourself, who you’re talking with - what makes them “tick”, will help tremendously even if you do nothing else. Of course, with a combination of a genuine smile, knowing their behavioral preferences and emotional word pictures, it might not matter what you’re asking them to do, they’ll sure give it their best shot!

Whoever perpetuated the idea that ‘it’s lonely at the top’ must not have experienced the rewards of teamwork! Have you, at one time of your life, been part of a group or sports team? Do you remember how it was when the team first came together? There was confusion, a couple of very talented showboats, and a few with too little self-esteem to know why they were even there with about everything in between. Generally speaking it was chaotic at best. The vision of winning was vague but slowly, as the coach (leader) and teammates got to know each other, they begun to realize who was talented at what and how each member depended on each other. Everyone started cultivating and utilizing individuals’ talents for the betterment of all. Trust and synergy formed, empowering everyone as an integral part of a unit greater than themselves – with a purpose.

These days the catch phrase to succeed is empowerment. It is however, what I have come to know as the absolute key to success with any endeavor. When we care and connect with anyone enough to empower him or her, synergy is almost inevitable. This requires a transformation from winning by competitiveness to winning by cooperation. Again let me offer a quote from John Maxwell in his book, “Developing the Leaders Around You”: “Confidence is not simply for show. Confidence empowers. A good leader has the ability to instill within his people confidence in himself. A great leader has the ability to instill within his people confidence in themselves.”

Truly understanding relationship skills and training yourself to see the half full side of the glass (yes gentlemen – we recognize the contradiction from your “business and emotions don’t mix mode” yet being able to fully connect to get the ‘job’ done on a sports team), will allow the heightened benefits and increased production of synergy every time. Once we, as leaders begin to do either, we have the foundation of a great team. Soon, people will be rallying around to volunteer to do jobs rather than you having to delegate.

“If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly

people grant your requests when those requests appeal to

their self-interest, you can have practically anything you go

after.” - Napoleon Hill

In the meantime, trust that the people you give a task to are capable of handling it. They’ll feel it if you don’t and without even conscious awareness, a couple of universal laws may come into play: we create our biggest fears and/or whatever we focus on grows. You’ll be pulling teeth if you attempt to micro-manage how they get the job done, or if you have a strict single vision of an acceptable final outcome. It's easy to slip right back into doing everything ourselves. It may take a little time and effort to build your team but in the long run, the depth of your bench and ability to delegate is what will help you and everyone else grow to greater heights and achieve much, much more.

So, my dear friend, I look forward to seeing you at the top and suspect you too will want to connect energy wise with a hug instead of a handshake. :)