Simply Said

CHAPTER 13 You Can’t Do It All Delegating Successfully

Ideally, you’re in a role that allows you to grow. Sometimes that growth takes place because your job itself evolves. New technology or business innovations require us to change the way we accomplish our functions and add value to the organization. Other times, the function we’ve been performing stays the same, but we move on to a bigger or different challenge. The most significant step we take in our growth is when we move from managing ourselves to managing others.

When we manage ourselves, we deal with many outside factors that influence our work product, including how other people meet their deadlines, time pressures to meet our deadlines, competing demands from different sources, and changes to company policies that impact our motivation. Each of us has our own way of dealing with these variables that allows us to function effectively.

As soon as we start to manage others, we deal with all of these same issues multiplied by the number of people we manage. In addition, we have to figure out how each of the people we manage handles this balance. That’s a huge change to our role. The moment we step into a management function, we realize that dealing with the “people stuff” takes the majority of our energy. That’s not good or bad. It’s just our new reality. When offering a management role, no one ever says, “Congratulations on your promotion. By the way, all the stuff you have been doing so far will now become secondary ...