Did you let go?

No wonder you are doing the same things that you did yesterday.

No wonder your professional career is at a standstill inspite of stellar performance on chosen tasks/initiatives

No wonder you cannot find the time to complete the one item that your leader requested you to take care off

No wonder you never have time to enhance your overall professional portfolio – Eminence activities, Investing in people, Industry expertise and so on

All because you can NOT Let go.

While taking up new things sounds tougher I have found more and more of my friends struggling with trying to let go of some task level or even strategic level responsibility. Is the requirement to let go of a responsibility and not worry about it all? – ‘No.'

• As a team leads/manager, you are still the owner of all that is going on or not going on! You just do not have enough time to do everything yourself. While it can be debated that one can increase their working hours or push the envelope of efficiency to still execute on all existing responsibilities while he/she takes on newer ones. Question is at what cost?
• At the cost of health and family time
• At the cost of no growth aspect for team members as their job exposure wouldn’t change if you do not let go
• At the cost of other professionals to try newer things and fail in a ‘safe’ environment while you are still around to review the product before it goes out the door.

Once you understand the imperative of letting go least you want to become indispensable (frankly indispensability is a fallacy) which translates to immovable, you need to think about ways and means to reach your goal.

In my experience below are a few good starters –

Identify the low hanging fruits – Tasks/priorities that are nevertheless of value but do not need your name tag to go along with them all the time – Status emails, Release analysis reports amongst others – You should delegate them out for others to experience the process of coming up with these artifacts. 

Does it need to be done today? – If it needs to be done today, then you are probably better holding on to the tasks yourself or work in close tandem with a resource to get it completed to satisfaction. Delegation is good but is often accompanies with some (if not too much) back and forth, and this comes in the way of an urgent deliverable.

Was it supposed to be done today? – Keep close track on your work queue and avoid hitting items just before the deadline. No one likes to receive a task that has been on the countdown in your mailbox. Dedicate time slots during the day to go through emails/meet key stakeholders and delegate out the tasks (based on risk assessment) with ample notice to your team.

 Need vs. Desire – Do you really need to do it ? or You just want to do it? – I am a coder at heart and each day fight the temptation to sit down and start creating automated scripts. Not that it is a waste of time there is undoubtedly a lot of value I will gain by keeping myself updated and in good shape as a coder – I simply do not have enough time to pursue strategic goals while focusing on transaction tasks.

 How do I fight the looming feeling of not working on anything valuable or not producing a tangible work product? – I ensure that I spent some time with folks who code each day and if possible add value to the technical discussion. The investment, in this case, is 20-30 min per day at-most while the realized ROI can be commented upon by my team I derive a lot of satisfaction out of this exercise.

 While the above approach/ideas are good on paper, a critical component of being able to delegate is owning up the ‘Delegation readiness’ quotient of your team members.

Give them opportunities to try out ‘new’ ideas and approaches in a safe environment and inculcate a culture of risk-based execution rather than zero failure tolerance. Failure is okay as long as the impact can be controlled.

Resist the urge to correct course as soon as the ship has left the shore – This is one of the most difficult ones. With experience, each of us develops some ability to foresee the impact of a certain approach regarding the need to turn around and to start again. Do not let your insight become a disabler for your team to gain their share of experience but know when to intervene as stated in the above point.

Practice distributed investment – As the saying goes ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ – It is a key responsibility of any leader to invest in individuals across the team for two primary reasons -

• Each individual is different, and regardless of investment the return depends on underlying potential in a given area of expertise – There is a need to focus on allowing each team member to be the best version of himself/herself rather than trying to for everyone in the same mold.
• It is critical that your team members enjoy the journey of their respective growth. There will always be growing pains, but if we keep pushing them to focus on ‘Development areas’ and ignore ‘Strengths,' the end result would only be disengaged frustrated individuals.

While your passion and love for your craft have got you to your current juncture holding on to specific tasks/responsibility for too long deprives you of growth opportunities. Just as a role and underlying responsibility evolve the passion and focus of each professional needs to evolve as well.

You would always be who you are at heart, and your eyes will light up each time technology/process/client service/people investment topic comes up, but you simply cannot afford to doze off at the sight of other equally important priorities.

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