About delegation and prioritization...

Delegation and prioritization were 2 topics I wasn't planning on addressing this early in my writings and I wasn't thinking to include them together in one single post, because, even though they may be related when you need to juggle around tasks which has been assigned to you by your supervisor (or help your people with their scheduling), it is not a MUST. The reason to include them together comes from the fact that when I thought no one reads my blog, someone actually did and that person asked about my views about these topics... so here it goes, hope this helps you!

Let's start with delegation and also from the fact that delegating MUST be in any manager's toolbox. I'm all about delegating, and I hate micromanaging, but in tasks where control is necessary, I try doing that in a non-invasive way (will talk about some techniques I use in detail later on).
Delegating literally means, give something from your workload to someone else (assigning a regular task is not delegating). All managers should delegate, and the main reason is not because we can't do everything ourselves - which in some cases is very true - but because delegating is one of the most efficient ways of mentoring (mentoring also coming as a topic later), and mentoring is up there in importance as one of the things a manager should be doing.
Delegating is also a great way of motivating, almost everyone wants to feel important, and taking on more responsibility surely does the trick. In Asia delegating is also a sign of trust and respect and if you read my previous posts, these two words are very important in your interaction with the locals.
Delegating also frees your time to do non-scheduled tasks, managers should be proactive and doing everything yourself may not leave you enough time to improve stuff, or simply step aside to look at the bigger picture.

So far, all positives for both side (you and your people), but there are also negative points on delegating, and some of them are even more obvious here in Asia...
You need to be very aware on who you delegate something to, taking in consideration 2 main factors. First, the person MUST have the time to do what you're asking them to do, a manager's job is getting the best from each person, stretching them to achieve their full potential and utilization, but overworking someone is just not 'right'. If you still want to assign that task to someone very 'busy', make sure you work together on his/her schedule to free up time for that, and make sure you prioritize correctly, always keep in mind, your task may not be more important than what they already doing, so keep an open mind, and remember, in Asia, people are very reluctant to say no to the 'boss', so be careful what you ask for. Second, the person you assign the task to, should know a bit about the task to be able to do it, and even if they know more than a bit, you should be prepared to spend time with them as a guide.
I'm sure you heard the phrase "If you want things done right, do it yourself", this can't be applied to delegating, or you won't delegate at all, but it tells you something very important, no matter how good the person you delegated to is, the result won't be the same as if you did it yourself, so, if you want to have a similar result, you have no option but to get involved and mentor your staff, before, during and after the task has been done. The more you mentor, the more they will deliver results you're pleased with.
The aforementioned also applies to timing, don't expect the task to take the same time as if you did it yourself, be patient and nurturing, trust me, extra time spent while delegating, will pay its dividends in more than one way.

Now talking about prioritization. Two reasons why prioritizing is so important, first, we obviously need some things done before others, and second, because humans are not good in multi-tasking. Prioritization works better when you're well organized, you can prioritize all you want, but if you don't organize your day and time effectively, that will do nothing. So prioritization goes hand-in-hand with time-management and time-management is almost a topic on itself, in my case I adhere to the idea of time being relative and that you can do as much as you want with your time... as far as you avoid multi-tasking!!! In fact I don't even agree with time-management software, or for that case, time-keeping as a general concept, but I do agree in keeping time within tasks, so you can compare if you're doing things more efficiently when comparing. Anyway, to conclude time-management, just stop multi-tasking, focus more (i.e. always approach a task or problem knowing what you want) and don't interrupt yourself (e-mail, Facebook, MSN, Skype can wait).. so no more time spent on time-management, but if you want to read more I can recommend this article I quite agree with about time-management.
But again, the main reason to prioritize is to get things done in a timely manner, and when you're managing many tasks at the same time without any given order, you normally need to use your common sense to sort them out, if you're not sure, run your list through your supervisor, if that's not an option, ask opinion from your peers (on important things only, duh!).
If new things come in, make sure you re-prioritize your tasks accordingly and when you're getting a new task with high priority, don't be afraid of voice your opinion if you think a task should have a lower priority, managers can have judgement errors, and in the worse case, the supervisor will just explain why that task has precedence.


Connecting the dots with an example related with previous posts (a report like this could easily become a KPI). Let's say the board or CEO would like to know what's the production capacity on a weekly basis so they can feed that information to the sales team to tell customers when is the earliest slot in which they can schedule their requirements, ergo, try to sell the slot, and he needs it in 2 weeks. Let's complicate it saying that this request came as very urgent and in a period of auditing, so you really need to focus on that as well.

That's what you'd call a catch 22 situation, because you can't delegate the auditing, you can't tell the CEO to wait until after the auditing is finished, because you just can't. Also your whole department could be busy with the auditors and/or normal work, so if you delegate the report 2 things can happen, you're causing a domino effect to the person below you, overworking him/her or because you still have to supervise the report, you didn't free up enough of your time. What to do? Quit and find a new job? Even though failure is always an option, that would be failing too badly to consider it an option.

So here's where your organization skills come to play. There are many more things you need to do as a manager, i.e., for sure you have department meetings, personal meetings (1-on-1), scheduled calls, etc. use them wisely. What do I mean with that? use them to delegate lesser tasks and free a bit of your time, I myself would delegate the report to a person to whom I have 1-on-1 meetings with, and instead of having a meeting once a week, would divide the time for that meeting into 2 shorter meetings, so I can keep a closer look into how the report is coming along, and also check his schedule.

Now to the detail, how to manage the delegation of such an important report without using too much of your time, without disrupting the work of your staff and getting a report which you'd be happy with?

You will have to do some pre-work for sure! you will have to visualize how you want the report to look like, this includes what you want in it and using what format, identify who that person will have to work with to generate a report like that (this may cause extra facilitating work, so it's important to identify it), timeframe, and ideas on how the info can be acquired. Once that's done you can move to the act of delegating.
As I said before I don't like micromanaging, so I use what I call non-invasive control points to check statuses and progress, for example, I avoid having meetings about a particular subject that I need to control unless it's totally necessary, I keep agenda meetings short, but multi-subject for that, 1-on-1 meetings are perfect for controlling without being intrusive, use phrases like "I'd suggest you to...", "what do you think if instead of...", "Do you have any other ideas for this..., can I share my idea?...", be very appreciative of their effort (after all, they're doing your job), and avoid at all cost telling them exactly what to do, leave some room for creativity, encourage them to ask you if they have any doubt (you can even schedule these interruptions, and remember, a 5 mins interruption can avoid days of re-working something), if you don't agree with what they're doing, sell them your idea, get them on board instead of dismissing theirs (as said in Sell, not tell), pointing too much to errors can lead to demotivation, avoid that as well, so be subtle... remember, when you start delegating something to someone you're being almost like a teacher, you're a mentor, a sensei, a guru... Mr. Miyagi or Yoda if you will... so acting all philosophical and mystical may even work :)

Good luck and hope this helps!