- Email: [email protected]
Delegation: Getting It Right to Lead Successfully
PROFILES IN LEADERSHIP
FRANK JAMES LEXA, MD, MBA
Delegation: Getting It Right to Lead Successfully I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow. —Woodrow Wilson [1]
DRIVERS THAT FORCE DELEGATION IN ORGANIZATIONS
Get the right people in the right jobs—it is more important than developing a strategy. —Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric [2]
Size isn’t the only issue that forces leaders to delegate tasks, responsibilities, and authority. Complexity also drives the need for leaders to rely more on those they lead. Leadership and management challenges multiply quickly as organizations grow into more markets and geographies, as their goals become more diverse, and as their environments change more rapidly. Leaders cannot be in all these places, let alone understand all of the markets, personalities, technical details, and so on. Another reason for delegation is that it is the only effective way leaders can possibly protect their ability to do their own jobs. Otherwise, they would be flooded with thousands of mundane decisions each day, and they would be unable to do their own jobs of leading. Leaders need to be able to have time to focus on the larger issues that their organizations face.
INTRODUCTION One of the great flaws of many leaders is the inability to effectively delegate. One can err in both directions: too much or too little. All leaders face the dilemma of when and why to delegate tasks to others in their organizations. No single person can or should try to run an organization alone, and no one can effectively lead a reasonably sized organization by micromanaging. This is particularly true of radiology groups. These are usually multimillion dollar enterprises facing severe external and occasionally internal challenges. No outside CEO in their right mind would take on such a job in such an organization without a clear plan to find ways to delegate both decisions and managerial tasks. It would simply be too prone to failure. In consulting work with radiology practices, I have encountered several groups that have teetered toward disaster because the presidents or CEOs either did not want to or could not delegate key administrative tasks. Just as destructive and often more common is a lack of interest by other partners in taking on these duties and roles, leaving it to one person, usually to the detriment of all. 850
EFFECTIVE DELEGATION The first and perhaps the biggest task in the issue of delegation is to find people you trust enough in your organization. They clearly need to be both reliable and trustworthy. A cliché in human resources is that you don’t want smart people, and you don’t want people who can get things done. Rather, you need to hire people who are both smart and capable of meeting goals. Those are the people who can work autonomously and take on leadership challenges. They are the
folks to whom you can safely delegate tasks and assignments. When you read business books, particularly biographies, one theme that is highly consistent across most authors is this challenge. Seasoned leaders stress that the biggest hurdle to being successful is first finding the right people. If you don’t have the right people (ie, if they can’t do their jobs well or can’t be trusted), then you can’t delegate, and your effectiveness as a leader remains limited. EXECUTIVE DELEGATION, THE EXTREME FORMS: CARTER AND REAGAN Delegation is always a matter of degree. One can do too much, as well as too little. In this presidential election year, it is illuminating to consider how two recent American presidents demonstrated these pitfalls in their leadership styles. Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, had been a nuclear engineer by training. He came into office in 1977, in the shadow of the Watergate scandal, which had led to the first resignation of an American president, Richard Nixon. His lack of experience in Washington (his last office had been governor of Georgia) was seen as a plus in the wake of public outcry over the pardon of Nixon by Gerald Ford. Carter had a meticulous attention to detail and remarkable ability to absorb arcane data. The problem was that these abilities aren’t part of the job description of any executive position. In the case of the American presidency, there is probably no other job on the planet in which one is at a greater risk for failure if
© 2008 American College of Radiology 0091-2182/08/$34.00 ● DOI 10.1016/j.jacr.2008.04.009
Profiles in Leadership 851
one doesn’t surround oneself with smart, effective people to whom one can delegate complex tasks. No job depends more on the ability to delegate and to delegate well. Carter was criticized for most of the factors involved in delegation discussed here: poor choices of staff members, an inability to delegate tasks, and the impossibility of having the chief executive look at every bit of minutiae on a major decision. President Carter’s management style was lampooned in a memorable episode of the television variety program Saturday Night Live in which the actor portraying Carter took radio call-in questions and showed a ridiculous range and depth of knowledge in answering questions, including medical advice on how to come down from a bad drug trip. His presidency was limited by his style. The White House couldn’t adequately address the many pressing issues that arose during the administration’s 4 years. A very telling canard about the American chief executive is that the president doesn’t need to look for trouble. In most administrations, in fact in most years, trouble finds the president. Carter’s administration, unfortunately, was no exception, facing a variety of serious challenges, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a revolution in Iran that led to both an oil boycott and the taking of American citizens hostage for over a year, all on top of an ailing economy. Crises, even more so than day-to-day business, can be handled only by those with the leadership skills to rise to the occasion. His successor, Ronald Reagan, was also heavily criticized, but in his case, it was at the other end of the spectrum: for overly delegating his authority as president. Reagan’s previous career included a long his-
tory of working in radio and later in Hollywood. This gave him a strong grasp of symbolism, style, and the importance of narrative and message in the presidency. He had been in the political arena, including being the governor of California, and he brought with him to Washington an experienced crew of remarkably loyal staff and cabinet members. He was used to a work style in which he was in charge of command decisions, and his advisors and staffers took care of the details. The press had a field day with his work style. Unlike his predecessor, Reagan would not be staying up late reading policy papers. Instead, he would try to be finished by 5 PM or so and perhaps have the speaker of the House (Tip O’Neill, from the other side of the aisle) over for cocktails. He often napped during the day, and staff members were instructed to keep meetings on time and to the point to accommodate his schedule. Reagan would not have dreamed of staying up into the wee hours with his staff having bull sessions about policy minutiae or the budget, as President Clinton often did. He provided direction for the big points and again trusted his staff to make things happen. The perception that his work style meant that he wasn’t a hard worker or an involved president was serious enough. However, a far more critical charge arose during his second term. When it became clear that members of the executive branch had concocted a complex arms deal that circumvented Congress, his presidency was threatened. In the end, both the accusation and the defense became one and the same: that Reagan hadn’t been involved because he hadn’t participated in the key decisions that led to the debacle.
GETTING DELEGATION RIGHT: THE RULES So, how can we do better as leaders when it comes to delegation? The first rule, as discussed earlier, is to get the right people. You need to have people to whom you can delegate: they need to be able to take responsibility, and you need to be able to give them latitude. An equally important second rule is that delegation is not putting off decisions or a form of outsourcing. You, as the leader or delegator, will still need to retain involvement, oversight, and responsibility. Some of the worst forms of leadership involve handing off responsibility—“Get the emergency room service under control or else”— without sharing or giving to the receiver of this news the authority or other tools to accomplish the task. Responsibility for a task without the authority to achieve it, particularly lone responsibility, is both frustrating and stressful. In the worst cases, it is also a form of nefarious leadership. A leader who doesn’t want to be sullied with difficulty (or failure) hands off losing tasks to underlings, who can then be blamed—“That idiot Dr X screwed up the emergency room service.” The third rule is the mutual sharing of information between a leader and coworkers. One of the drivers of the need for delegation is the complexity of information in your enterprise. Delegation is really a cooperative exercise and thus works both ways. You delegate because you can’t know everything that your underlings do, and so you let them take charge. On the other hand, you as the leader need to share your knowledge as appropriate to help your group members be effective. The fourth rule is that delegation is not an all-or-nothing event. Tan-
852 Profiles in Leadership
nenbaum and Schmidt [3] described this process as a continuum, with the gradual devolution of more power and authority to the person or team being delegated to as they in turn demonstrate ability and competency. This allows for a controlled transfer of power and authority and is one of the subtle keys to the art of delegation. The fifth rule of delegation is that it can also be a form of training. Smart leaders know that there will come a time when their own days of leading are numbered. For the sake of the group and for their personal legacies of achievement, they need to consider ways to use delegation to develop the next
group of leaders to take the reins. This is not just an issue for the distant future. In my consulting work, I have advised several groups in which almost all of the leadership efforts were being done by one person. All of that information was in the mind of a single brain. These groups are literally always one “plane ride” (ie, one fatal flight) away from disaster. When most of the institutional knowledge is in the head of a single person, the group is at enormous risk.
1. Mr. Wilson bares a president’s woes; in remarkable speech he describes his inner self and conflicting emotions. The New York Times. March 21, 1914:1.
CONCLUSION
2. Welch J, Byrne J. Jack: straight from the gut. New York: Warner Books.
Delegation is one of the defining aspects of great leadership. It is the
3. Tannenbaum and Schmidt continuum. Available at: http://www.businessballs.com/ tannenbaum.htm. Accessed March 20, 2008.
ability to leverage your skills so that your effectiveness is multiplied. Like other facets of leadership, it is not just a matter of delegating or not but rather how you do it that determines the effectiveness of your leadership and your group’s success. REFERENCES
Frank James Lexa, MD, MBA, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, GCP, 306 Gypsy, Wynnewood, PA 19096; e-mail: [email protected].
FRANK JAMES LEXA, MD, MBA
Delegation: Getting It Right to Lead Successfully I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow. —Woodrow Wilson [1]
DRIVERS THAT FORCE DELEGATION IN ORGANIZATIONS
Get the right people in the right jobs—it is more important than developing a strategy. —Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric [2]
Size isn’t the only issue that forces leaders to delegate tasks, responsibilities, and authority. Complexity also drives the need for leaders to rely more on those they lead. Leadership and management challenges multiply quickly as organizations grow into more markets and geographies, as their goals become more diverse, and as their environments change more rapidly. Leaders cannot be in all these places, let alone understand all of the markets, personalities, technical details, and so on. Another reason for delegation is that it is the only effective way leaders can possibly protect their ability to do their own jobs. Otherwise, they would be flooded with thousands of mundane decisions each day, and they would be unable to do their own jobs of leading. Leaders need to be able to have time to focus on the larger issues that their organizations face.
INTRODUCTION One of the great flaws of many leaders is the inability to effectively delegate. One can err in both directions: too much or too little. All leaders face the dilemma of when and why to delegate tasks to others in their organizations. No single person can or should try to run an organization alone, and no one can effectively lead a reasonably sized organization by micromanaging. This is particularly true of radiology groups. These are usually multimillion dollar enterprises facing severe external and occasionally internal challenges. No outside CEO in their right mind would take on such a job in such an organization without a clear plan to find ways to delegate both decisions and managerial tasks. It would simply be too prone to failure. In consulting work with radiology practices, I have encountered several groups that have teetered toward disaster because the presidents or CEOs either did not want to or could not delegate key administrative tasks. Just as destructive and often more common is a lack of interest by other partners in taking on these duties and roles, leaving it to one person, usually to the detriment of all. 850
EFFECTIVE DELEGATION The first and perhaps the biggest task in the issue of delegation is to find people you trust enough in your organization. They clearly need to be both reliable and trustworthy. A cliché in human resources is that you don’t want smart people, and you don’t want people who can get things done. Rather, you need to hire people who are both smart and capable of meeting goals. Those are the people who can work autonomously and take on leadership challenges. They are the
folks to whom you can safely delegate tasks and assignments. When you read business books, particularly biographies, one theme that is highly consistent across most authors is this challenge. Seasoned leaders stress that the biggest hurdle to being successful is first finding the right people. If you don’t have the right people (ie, if they can’t do their jobs well or can’t be trusted), then you can’t delegate, and your effectiveness as a leader remains limited. EXECUTIVE DELEGATION, THE EXTREME FORMS: CARTER AND REAGAN Delegation is always a matter of degree. One can do too much, as well as too little. In this presidential election year, it is illuminating to consider how two recent American presidents demonstrated these pitfalls in their leadership styles. Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, had been a nuclear engineer by training. He came into office in 1977, in the shadow of the Watergate scandal, which had led to the first resignation of an American president, Richard Nixon. His lack of experience in Washington (his last office had been governor of Georgia) was seen as a plus in the wake of public outcry over the pardon of Nixon by Gerald Ford. Carter had a meticulous attention to detail and remarkable ability to absorb arcane data. The problem was that these abilities aren’t part of the job description of any executive position. In the case of the American presidency, there is probably no other job on the planet in which one is at a greater risk for failure if
© 2008 American College of Radiology 0091-2182/08/$34.00 ● DOI 10.1016/j.jacr.2008.04.009
Profiles in Leadership 851
one doesn’t surround oneself with smart, effective people to whom one can delegate complex tasks. No job depends more on the ability to delegate and to delegate well. Carter was criticized for most of the factors involved in delegation discussed here: poor choices of staff members, an inability to delegate tasks, and the impossibility of having the chief executive look at every bit of minutiae on a major decision. President Carter’s management style was lampooned in a memorable episode of the television variety program Saturday Night Live in which the actor portraying Carter took radio call-in questions and showed a ridiculous range and depth of knowledge in answering questions, including medical advice on how to come down from a bad drug trip. His presidency was limited by his style. The White House couldn’t adequately address the many pressing issues that arose during the administration’s 4 years. A very telling canard about the American chief executive is that the president doesn’t need to look for trouble. In most administrations, in fact in most years, trouble finds the president. Carter’s administration, unfortunately, was no exception, facing a variety of serious challenges, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and a revolution in Iran that led to both an oil boycott and the taking of American citizens hostage for over a year, all on top of an ailing economy. Crises, even more so than day-to-day business, can be handled only by those with the leadership skills to rise to the occasion. His successor, Ronald Reagan, was also heavily criticized, but in his case, it was at the other end of the spectrum: for overly delegating his authority as president. Reagan’s previous career included a long his-
tory of working in radio and later in Hollywood. This gave him a strong grasp of symbolism, style, and the importance of narrative and message in the presidency. He had been in the political arena, including being the governor of California, and he brought with him to Washington an experienced crew of remarkably loyal staff and cabinet members. He was used to a work style in which he was in charge of command decisions, and his advisors and staffers took care of the details. The press had a field day with his work style. Unlike his predecessor, Reagan would not be staying up late reading policy papers. Instead, he would try to be finished by 5 PM or so and perhaps have the speaker of the House (Tip O’Neill, from the other side of the aisle) over for cocktails. He often napped during the day, and staff members were instructed to keep meetings on time and to the point to accommodate his schedule. Reagan would not have dreamed of staying up into the wee hours with his staff having bull sessions about policy minutiae or the budget, as President Clinton often did. He provided direction for the big points and again trusted his staff to make things happen. The perception that his work style meant that he wasn’t a hard worker or an involved president was serious enough. However, a far more critical charge arose during his second term. When it became clear that members of the executive branch had concocted a complex arms deal that circumvented Congress, his presidency was threatened. In the end, both the accusation and the defense became one and the same: that Reagan hadn’t been involved because he hadn’t participated in the key decisions that led to the debacle.
GETTING DELEGATION RIGHT: THE RULES So, how can we do better as leaders when it comes to delegation? The first rule, as discussed earlier, is to get the right people. You need to have people to whom you can delegate: they need to be able to take responsibility, and you need to be able to give them latitude. An equally important second rule is that delegation is not putting off decisions or a form of outsourcing. You, as the leader or delegator, will still need to retain involvement, oversight, and responsibility. Some of the worst forms of leadership involve handing off responsibility—“Get the emergency room service under control or else”— without sharing or giving to the receiver of this news the authority or other tools to accomplish the task. Responsibility for a task without the authority to achieve it, particularly lone responsibility, is both frustrating and stressful. In the worst cases, it is also a form of nefarious leadership. A leader who doesn’t want to be sullied with difficulty (or failure) hands off losing tasks to underlings, who can then be blamed—“That idiot Dr X screwed up the emergency room service.” The third rule is the mutual sharing of information between a leader and coworkers. One of the drivers of the need for delegation is the complexity of information in your enterprise. Delegation is really a cooperative exercise and thus works both ways. You delegate because you can’t know everything that your underlings do, and so you let them take charge. On the other hand, you as the leader need to share your knowledge as appropriate to help your group members be effective. The fourth rule is that delegation is not an all-or-nothing event. Tan-
852 Profiles in Leadership
nenbaum and Schmidt [3] described this process as a continuum, with the gradual devolution of more power and authority to the person or team being delegated to as they in turn demonstrate ability and competency. This allows for a controlled transfer of power and authority and is one of the subtle keys to the art of delegation. The fifth rule of delegation is that it can also be a form of training. Smart leaders know that there will come a time when their own days of leading are numbered. For the sake of the group and for their personal legacies of achievement, they need to consider ways to use delegation to develop the next
group of leaders to take the reins. This is not just an issue for the distant future. In my consulting work, I have advised several groups in which almost all of the leadership efforts were being done by one person. All of that information was in the mind of a single brain. These groups are literally always one “plane ride” (ie, one fatal flight) away from disaster. When most of the institutional knowledge is in the head of a single person, the group is at enormous risk.
1. Mr. Wilson bares a president’s woes; in remarkable speech he describes his inner self and conflicting emotions. The New York Times. March 21, 1914:1.
CONCLUSION
2. Welch J, Byrne J. Jack: straight from the gut. New York: Warner Books.
Delegation is one of the defining aspects of great leadership. It is the
3. Tannenbaum and Schmidt continuum. Available at: http://www.businessballs.com/ tannenbaum.htm. Accessed March 20, 2008.
ability to leverage your skills so that your effectiveness is multiplied. Like other facets of leadership, it is not just a matter of delegating or not but rather how you do it that determines the effectiveness of your leadership and your group’s success. REFERENCES
Frank James Lexa, MD, MBA, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, GCP, 306 Gypsy, Wynnewood, PA 19096; e-mail: [email protected].