Today I bring you a great article by Elizabeth Saunders published in the Harward Business Review (www.harvardbusinessreview.com) about wanting to control everything in the work entitled 'How Office Control Freaks Can Learn to Let Go', in which Elizabeth talks about how stop controlling details when you have new responsibilities, learning to delegate and distribute tasks, and create monitoring systems for your team. As on other occasions, please excuse any errors in the translation.
Many highly skilled professionals experience an internal battle that rages when they rise from positions where they thrived as individual taxpayers, to positions that force their work to depend on others. On the one hand, they pride themselves on knowing more than anyone else about their area and are very confident in their abilities to do exceptional work. On the other hand, the scope of his new responsibilities makes it no longer possible to stay on top of every detail - and even makes it preferable.
If you are taking on an increasing number of projects or people, the only way to regain a sense of control is, paradoxically, to let go of control: let other people help you. This requires you to face fears like, "Maybe it won't be done the way I would have been." Or, "Maybe I'm going to have to defer the answer to someone else instead of immediately knowing the answer for myself." You also need to redefine control, from "having every detail in your head" to "having the right level of overview to make decisions with enough information and the right systems in place, to know when it's time to talk to someone or when you need to do the next action. " And you need to redefine your skills to "help others do a good job,»Instead of« working well by yourself ».
Here are four steps to put this mindset change into action, to achieve a greater sense of peace and control, and the autonomy of those around you:
1. Carefully evaluate what only you can do
If you continue to have added responsibilities to your position - such as more people to manage or more projects to supervise - the overload will come to you, unless you were previously working below your capacity.
To counter these added-time investments, you'll need to carefully examine what only you can do asking yourself these questions:
- Could someone complete this work to an acceptable level? Could someone be part of this project? Could someone do the initial project, so I would just have to review and "adjust"? This work prevents me from doing my homework activities. higher value?
2. Defer early and often
Deferring is different from delegating. To delegate is to give someone the job, being out of your personal responsibility; deferring incorporates delegating, and also involves passing the activities on to the appropriate person or persons, before the task reaches your to-do list. This requires diverting random tasks that really must go to someone else - even when they tell you, could you help me? For example, if someone asks you an IT question when there is a full-time IT department, please kindly direct them to the IT department. Or if someone asks you about a project you are no longer a part of, direct someone who is currently on the team. Or if you are invited to attend a meeting where you can offer an idea, but other attendees could probably offer something similar,consider not going.
Don't volunteer for additional activities if you can't get things off your own to-do list anymore. If you are used to doing everything yourself and you are proud to be able to solve everything, this will make you feel uncomfortable. You might even feel like you're not working as a team. But in the end, deferring the tasks that others can do is a sign of respect towards the competition of others, and allows others to have the capacity to do what only you could do before - which is what your team really needs..
3. Create simple monitoring systems - and trust them
When you have delegated or deferred issues for which you are responsible for the results, having monitoring systems plays a fundamental role in your ability to be sure that the work is done well.
To make sure this happens, you have to take two elements into account:
- A consistent follow-up to know what are the pending activities of your current projects. A consistent routine for verification.
Consistent tracking could be as simple as a Word or Excel document on Google Drive, or a task list in Outlook for each member of your team. For a higher level of sophistication, you can use a task management system like Asana. As for when to check these tasks, you can do it during the weekly planning time when you check the status of all projects; in a periodic meeting with the responsible person; or at the appropriate time before the delivery date. So that you can trust the system, make sure that all delegated tasks are in the Word or Excel document within Google Drive, or in the list of Outlook tasks you are using to track them, and that the dates to do the tracking are on your agenda.
4. Resist by taking control again
Once you begin to let go of control, inevitably, there will be a time when something will not be done the way you prefer. Your instinctive reaction will lead you to blame yourself for letting go - "Why did I have to let anyone else do this?" - which normally manifests on the surface as anger or frustration with others. But instead of immediately putting homework back on your agenda, transform this situation into an opportunity for learning. First, evaluate whether something different can be done in the future. Second, it helps the person who did the work understand what they need to know to complete the job successfully next time. Often, you won't know what went wrong until you really dig deep. Finally, remember that you should focus on your own higher value work,instead of letting the fear of letting go prevent you from making the biggest contribution to your organization.
In order to stop doing and personally control everything at work, you must evaluate what are the tasks that only you can do; defer and delegate the rest of the tasks to your team, create simple monitoring systems and take control again.
"When the requests are reasonable, fair, simple, clear and consistent, there is reciprocal satisfaction between the leader and the team" Sun Tzu.
