Power Tool: Control vs. Delegate

A Coaching Power Tool Created by Coca Staicu
(Life Coach, ROMANIA)

In our daily activity, we notice that one of the most common problems that managers approach in coaching sessions is lack of time for strategic activities of their company or lack of time for family. Being caught in the current problems, they get into a position in which they cannot detach from this problems, and they asked to give their agreement or to participate with solutions in the operational activities of the company to the detriment of strategic planning.

Behind the lack of time is often lack of delegation and the desire to control everything that happens in the company.

Control Freak Some of the characteristics of such a person are:

• They are able to manipulate people and situations so as to ensure that everything goes as was established by him / her, and even if his intentions are good, they can cause lot of pain for others;
• Basically these people have no intention to hurt somebody with their behavior, but only to protect themselves from possible adverse effects of not achieving goals;
• The working style is micromanagement with the aim of receiving personal goals (hidden agenda), which are often omitted being set as high standards, perfectionists;
• They can endlessly repeat that you need to change to cope with situations in life, and they are here to help you;
• Frequently presents the darkest scenarios;
• Give uncalled feedback and expect you to consider it constructive in order to help you improve your behavior that he/her miss;
• Use divide and conquer strategy in order to gain control of most of those around him and imposing their own means to work;
• Because they cannot control their own life, they focus on controlling others;
• Have deficit in dealing with spontaneous situations, lacking humor in these cases;
• Transmit others that their opinions are true, most suitable for solving situations and impose those around him;
• Having the belief that perfectionism will make them beloved by those around them, they try to impose their own standards and then judges the others according to this.

Delegative Management Style

Some of the characteristics of such a person are:

• Has a goal that he wants to achieve with the team, discuss the plan to achieve it with them and how this will impact individual and team skills developing;
• Let the person who takes over the responsibilities to choose which way to go towards result, even if during the process it turns out that is different from that in which he was originally thought, learning from this experience and enjoying achieve the result;
• He offers support any time when is required, asking the requester to come up with its own solutions which they will analyze together;
• He delegates the responsibility with employee consent, in line with his current skills and focus also on other related skills that he may develop during solving the task;
• Give the employee who takes over the responsibility, the benefits arising from the successful fulfillment of the task, benefits for him, for company and for clients with whom they interact and the end of activity he reward the results;
• When the task is completed and the result achieved, the manager delegate also the necessary authority, giving the employee the power to take and implement the necessary decisions;
• Evaluate the progress with the employee, and if the results are outside expectations found together with the employee solutions for solving the problem, encouraging him to continue and constantly praising progress;
• Continue to delegate even though in the past have been situations where the results of activity of the person who took over responsibilities were below expectations, because only in this way he can support the development of people and makes time him self to take strategic decisions.

Practical situation

A Head Pharmacist, decided ,after four years of business success due to his management style, to expand his business by increasing the number of pharmacies. In the fifth operating year, from a pharmacy with four employees, he expanded his activity to three pharmacies with 9 employees, and by the end of the sixth year he was running of 8 pharmacies with 28 employees.

As the business expanded, he became increasingly irritable with his employees, whom he accused of lacking commitment in their work, although their cooperation was the key of his current performance. On the other hand the lack of time got more acute, he was working 14 hours a day and on weekends, but still having a hard time to handle the situation, he got to the point of considering selling his business. He contacted a professional for a few coaching sessions,meant to improve his time management throughout the day.

After five sessions, we were able to detect the cause laying behind the symptom he was initially complaining, namely time management issues:it consisted in the lack of delegation of responsibilities to the pharmacist chief of the site, and the tendency to keep doing all the tasks he was doing six years ago: orders, invoices, relationship with suppliers, financial accounting etc.

After 8 coaching sessions he decided to delegate some of his responsibilities to the chiefs of pharmacies and he was assisted by a coach in this regard. Currently,this transfer process is ongoing as chiefs pharmacists take over part of the responsibilities he assumed in the past,and he finally got to balance the time he spent working with his private life and he managed to leave behind the chronic fatigue he was complaining about all the time.

Currently the sessions are focused on his fear that not everyone who had took over his responsibilities performs perfectly.

Coaching application

If you face a customer presenting symptoms such as of lack of time, chronic fatigue, difficulties in his relationship with family and lack of quality time spent with them,or tendency to make everything perfect, consider a dysfunction of the delegation process, that can lay from complete absence of delegation to previous unsuccessful experiences that left him reluctant for renewing this approach.
When working with such a customer, keep in mind that:

• Delegating the responsibilities allows your customer to focus on his management responsibilities, leaving the other tasks to be taken care of on each activity level;
• While working with the client, he needs to get aware of the full list of responsibilities he currently carries out, which are energy drainers , so that he can prioritize these tasks and figure out a delegation scheme - at first the client will hesitate to delegate any task, so the first to be delegated will be those he considers to have the slightest importance or the farthest due term;this will make him a little bit more comfortable with this step ,very much out of his comfort zone;
• It is widely accepted that a person cannot perform all tasks as this can only lead to exhaustion, decreased output quality, non respect of due dates etc;
• Working with the client to understand that delegating is not a sign of weakness, but rather a sign of leadership, and make how aware of benefits he can draw from responsibilities delegation;
• To manage is to lead people and support them in their work, help them to grow but not do their work at their place. He has to let people find their own ways to achieve results, through guidance and examples from his past experience in order to broaden their decision-making horizon - for the coach, working with such a manager is to make him realize which are the activities he takes over from his subordinates and what effect this has on his own activity;
• Management duties include achieving results through team members, so work with them into developing employees and succession plan direction.

Final Considerations

1. What is the impact on you when working with clients lacking the ability to delegate their work?
2. How good are yourself on delegating and how does such a customer resonates with you?
3. How hard is to accompany such a customer from the first step of symptoms identification to the depth of discovering his need to be in permanent control?
4. How can you prepare to work with such a client so as not to be absorbed in these issues that resonate with yours?