How 'going beyond the words' can make delegation work - Andrea Morrison

The last couple of weeks have been unbelievably busy, whilst I’m not complaining I couldn’t have pulled it off without the help of my amazing assistant and my business partner.

I’ve always loved working in a team, pulling together to get a project off the

ground, seeing a vision become reality, but it’s often something that those I work with struggle with.

Whether it’s a manager or a business owner, creating that shared vision, having your team pull together, delegating effectively, sharing the load is often the hardest thing to achieve.

One of the complaints I often get is that a team member (whether they be

employed or contracted) doesn’t do what they’ve been asked to do! I hear

reactions such as ‘it’s easier to do it myself’ or ‘it’s so frustrating when they do it wrong’.

In fact, it’s been the golden thread that has ran through many conversations recently almost echoing in the opposite way to my own experience.

Delegation often doesn’t feel easy, that it is the hardest part of business, when in many ways when we have more understanding of how we work it can be the most straightforward.

Take one example that I had, an employee that wasn’t working up to the standard that the owner, my client, required.

In the owner’s mind, they had a clear vision of what they wanted to create, in this case a high-end service, but their employee was falling short.

Each time, my client would ask them to do a task, they wouldn’t do all of it, missing bits out, overlooking others, which left my client frustrated, the job was ok but it wasn’t to the standard that was required in my client’s mind.

Instead of exploring delegation models and management techniques, we started at understanding how human beings all live in their own separate reality and how we create our reality using our experience, beliefs and ideas. I asked my client if the employee in question had any personal experience of the service they were trying to create, what had been shared with them, and became curious about what they had created in their own world about the service that they were trying to achieve.

In that moment, my client had an insight. They both had different realities of the service, in the employee’s mind it was likely they were achieving a high-end service but in my client’s mind they weren’t.

My client saw that in that moment, that to create a shared vision, they had to go beyond the words of ‘high end service’ and ensure that the team knew exactly what that meant, that they all created the same reality so they knew what it was they were aiming for.

Going ‘beyond the words’ is a game-changer for many managers and business owners, as we understand more about how humans create separate realities we are able to let go of the frustration and stress.

When we see that someone isn’t being deliberately difficult or lazy but they are simply doing what makes sense to them in their world, we are more able to spot innocent misunderstandings therefore avoiding unnecessary conflict and stress in the process.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Andrea Morrison is a Yorkshire-based transformational business coach and mentor