Delegating skills training 

Here’s a case study of someone who needed to develop his delegating skills.  It illustrates the approach taken on the London based "Skills with People" course:

Problem - Manager who was better at solving problems than anyone else in his team, but the more he solved the longer was the queue at his door.  His director was getting worried because the manager was working very long hours and beginning to show signs of strain. Although he started out showing great promise it was beginning to look as though he might not be able to go as far in his career as both he and others had hoped. The director had told him he needed to change his style of management – to do more delegating and to concentrate on developing his team - but although he tried, and in spite of his good intentions, he didn’t seem able to keep it up.

Diagnosis - He was very good at solving problems.  As soon as someone brought him a problem he would mentally take it over and solve it.  Unfortunately the effect this had on others was to prevent them from developing their own ability to solve problems.  It resulted in them lacking confidence in their ability to think for themselves and in them becoming increasingly dependent on him.  This in turn caused him to lose confidence in them, and so things went from bad to worse.  His compulsive problem-solving had become a habit that was threatening his career, and although the habit was a hard one to break he was going to have to change.

Mental obstacles to change - The first obstacle was his strong but deep seated conviction that if he could not produce the answer himself he would be seen to be failing in his job.  The second was the pace at which he worked - his permanent sense of time pressure.  He invariably felt he didn’t have time to coach others and that it would be much quicker to deal with the problem himself.  So no change would be possible or permanent unless he was able to give up the need to be seen to be the one providing the answer, and unless he was able to slow down his responses when faced with a problem.

Remedy - He first needed to be made clearly aware of the specific habit that was causing him the problem, and of the specific mental obstacles he would have to overcome.  He needed to realise and accept that although it started out as an asset, it had, in effect, become an obstacle to progress - that although changing such a habit is not easy his career depended on it.  Then he needed to learn how to shift the focus of his attention when someone brought him a difficulty from tackling it himself to finding out what was stopping them tackle it. This was an entirely different way of listening.  He’d never listened like this before, and at first he felt strange and uncomfortable doing it.  But with specific coaching, encouragement, practice and persistence he learned how to slow down, set aside his own thoughts about how to solve a problem, and pay attention instead to other people’s thoughts.  In this way he was able to start coaching people, win back control over his working day, change his style of management, do more delegating and rescue his career.

See also the Skills with People course contents