Leadership Lessons: Delegating, Empowerment, and Strategic Alignment

Getting your organization strategically aligned through delegation

There are good habits that we hope all of our supervisors and managers have to help them handle the often powerful and complex challenges of leadership. Bill Gates once said:

"Virtually every company will be going out and empowering with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes - thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before." --Bill Gates

Some Perspective

Leaders who regularly delegate are strategically aligned with their employees to improve business processes and provide feedback. This engages employees so that they are reciprocally aligned with their leaders.

Delegating demonstrates trust and encourages development. When you have these two factors at work in your organization, you have a positive environment in which empowered employees are focused on organizational goals.

By delegating responsibilities and projects with clear communication, the bonds of the team are strengthened, manager-employee relationships are improved and a synergistic relationship results. This ties managers and employees together in strategic alignment for the achievement of business goals. A Solution One of the most powerful tools a leader will ever have is communication. There is no replacement for being able to communicate well in the delegation process. Leaders must be able to communicate the "what" and the "why" of every task they delegate. Without taking the time to communicate correctly, misunderstandings occur, workloads become unbalanced, bonds are broken, processes stall, and strategic alignment with goals never occurs.

Therefore, to delegate and empower appropriately, managers and supervisors must learn the following skills:

• Explain the need for delegation.
  
• Use delegation of tasks to motivate.
  
• Explain tasks and ask team member's view (getting feedback).
  
• Specify responsibility and authority (empowerment).
  
• Confirming team member's understanding and set up time review (process improvement).
  

In a perfect world everyone is going out and empowering as is alluded to in our quote from Bill Gates; however, delegating does more than that. It develops people who are able to work through processes and make things better. Then as people develop, they move through the corporate ladder. Delegating expresses confidence in team members and motivates them to achieve strategic goals and redefine their own potential. Delegating creates your leaders of tomorrow, who already are strategically aligned with leadership and goals. What could be better than that?

The Vital Learning curriculum is designed to meet your training and budgetary needs. Want to learn more about "Delegating" or the complete Vital Learning leadership development curriculum? Available in Classroom, Online, or Blended delivery options, the Vital Learning curriculum includes the following essential topics.

• Delegating - understanding when to use delegation and how to make it motivating
• Complaints - being able to effectively manage complaints
  
• Coaching - knowing how to productively coach job skills
  
• Project Management - being able to run projects, both on-time and on-budget
  
• Conflict - understanding how to successfully resolve conflict
  
• Hiring Winning Talent- knowing what to do to consistently hire the right talent
  
• Providing Feedback - understanding how to establish performance goals and standards and give feedback
  
• And more...

For detail go to www.TheLearningEngine.org

Leadership Lessons: Communicating Up

Communicating upward to avoid productivity spiraling downward...

Interaction today comes in two ways: human-to-human and human-to-information. As a natural extension of the Information Age, the Interaction Age has come with messaging capabilities and real-time conferencing; however, with so much technology at our fingertips, it is easy to lose sight of what makes for productive communication between team leaders and employees. Of particular concern is the kind of communication that focuses on upward communication that leads to productivity and high performance.

Some Perspective

Great team leaders actively listen to employees. They also actively encourage employees to talk to each other, to customers, and to their leaders. The good news is that most people already have the skills to communicate to their team leaders; they simply need to apply them to their manager. This is the power of human-to-human dialogue that constitutes interaction. With it, employees are able to see the vision for the company and come closer to a sense of ownership in the company initiatives. In addition, this new interaction breeds an environment of teamwork, organizational flexibility, and corporate agility.

For employees to communicate effectively, they need to have a broader understanding of their manager's style and the work environment. For example, one manager may need communications provided in an "executive summary" format as an overview, while another requires more of the detail behind the summary. In any case, employees need to feel empowered with this understanding to alert their managers when issues, concerns, problems, as well as opportunities arise. Employees, who are engaged in the kind of interaction that uses 1) an understanding of style and 2) a process for communicating effectively, create a powerful framework that produces results and a positive working environment.

Take Jack for instance. Before receiving training on a process for communicating with his manager, he was stymied by what seemed to be impossible weekly meetings with his boss, Denise. It seemed to Jack that they were always butting heads because Denise constantly needled him for more details. Jack felt like she didn't trust him.

After training, he learned that everyone has a communication style and that his boss's style was different from his own. Jack deduced that their weekly interaction was not necessarily negative nor a personal attack; it was just Denise's need for more detail. Jack now has a greater understanding of what is required to satisfy his team leader's communication style and move the conversation forward to reach their objectives. Now, Jack looks forward to his weekly meetings.

A Solution

It's actually pretty simple. When employees are trained how to communicate up, they are more committed to the organization and naturally ask for more feedback from their team leader. Everyone takes the next step, listening to each other and responding appropriately. The environment changes, and old problems clear away to be replaced by productive interactivity and passionate employee involvement.

"Communicating Up" is a program by Vital Learning that can teach your managers, team leaders, and employees to be engaged in positive interaction. This program will help your people:

• Enter meetings with well-thought out and clearly stated objectives.
  
• Clearly link objectives that support plans and goals.
  
• Move conversations toward questions that focus on understanding gained when your objective is reached.

These are just a few of the powerful tools for communicating up interaction. Putting your training plan in place to address the Interaction Age will keep the human-to-human communication on track and move it toward productive goals.

The Vital Learning curriculum is designed to meet your training and budgetary needs. Want to learn more about "Essential Skills of Leadership" or the complete Vital Learning leadership development curriculum? Available in Classroom, Online, or Blended delivery options, the Vital Learning curriculum includes the following essential topics.

• Delegating - understanding when to use delegation and how to make it motivating
• Complaints - being able to effectively manage complaints
  
• Coaching - knowing how to productively coach job skills
  
• Project Management - being able to run projects, both on-time and on-budget
  
• Conflict - understanding how to successfully resolve conflict
  
• Hiring Winning Talent- knowing what to do to consistently hire the right talent
  
• Providing Feedback - understanding how to establish performance goals and standards and give feedback
  
• And more...

For detail go to www.TheLearningEngine.org