two tips for leadership and delegation

Summary

delegation breaks the same way every time: two people leave the meeting thinking different things are happening. here are two tips I stole from aviation that fix that.

1. the positive handoff. in the cockpit, control of the aircraft moves with explicit verbal exchange: “your aircraft.” “my aircraft.” “your aircraft.” three confirmations. no ambiguity about who has the stick. translate to business: when you delegate, say it explicitly, get explicit acknowledgement, restate it. “you own this.” “I own this.” “you own this.” sounds weird the first time. saves you hours.

2. the written read-back. after the meeting, the person who took the task writes you back: this is what I heard, this is what I’m doing, this is the deadline. you confirm or correct. now you both have a written record of the same understanding.

if your team asks a lot of questions after a hand-off, your hand-off is broken, not them. if you keep saying “I told them to do X” and X isn’t getting done, X was not actually clearly assigned. lead better. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to the topic of delegation in leadership

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Are you delegating properly to your employees? This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I wanted to hop on for a really quick podcast on delegation. So we just wrapped up meeting with several entrepreneurs and a lot of them were asking me questions about leadership, delegation, and you know, as they go through this process of building their businesses, it’s a skill that they’re having to learn and they realize what they’re good at and what they’re not good at.

And leadership cannot be mastered. It’s just something that you have to practice. You have to make mistakes. You have to adjust. You have to continually be being the person who tries hard. You have to try hard in leadership at all times. You can never really coast. And the second you do, the team doesn’t perform.

discussing the misconception of communication skills among leaders

That doesn’t mean you have to be on everyone’s ass and all this kind of stuff. It just means that you do always need to lead. If you are the leader, you can’t really take breaks. So one of the questions I got today was about delegation. And the more I, you know, practice leadership and the more I dive into helping other people do the same thing, one thing I realize is how important communication is.

And not only how important communication is, but one thing I realize is that a lot of people think that they are great communicators. In all honesty, most people I talk to think they are great communicators. How could this possibly be? How could everyone just be a 10 out of 10 communicator? I don’t think that it’s true.

I don’t think that you listening to this are as good at communication as you think that you are. But I don’t think I’m as good at communication as I think that I am. And the reason I know that is because this happens where I will talk to an employee, I feel like I’m perfectly clear, but then the product, the end product, something was miscommunicated, a detail was missed, and I can’t help but take ownership on the fact that I didn’t communicate it clearly enough.

explanation of the positive handoff technique from aviation and its application in business

So what can we do? What can we do to be better communicators? Well, there are a few things. And here’s some things that I implement. The first one I got from pilot training in the Air Force when I was going through training. And in the aviation world, and this isn’t just in the Air Force, anytime you’re working with, you have like an instructor pilot and student pilot relationship, there’s something called a positive handoff.

And this isn’t just exclusive to aviation, really it’s big in the military or really any job where any kind of handoff is very important, being very clear who’s in charge or who has responsibility. So an example of a positive handoff, if you have two people flying the aircraft or two people who could fly the aircraft, there’s only ever one person actually flying the aircraft in this instructor pilot, student pilot relationship.

It’s either the student pilot is flying the aircraft or the instructor pilot is flying the aircraft. There is no, I’ll do a little bit, you do a little bit. It’s either you’re flying or I’m flying. Very simple way how we distinguish this in a cockpit. And it’s a positive handoff through communication.

detailed steps for clearer communication when delegating tasks

So if I no longer wanted to fly as a student pilot or as an instructor pilot, I would say, you have the aircraft. Then the instructor pilot or student pilot on the other end would say, I have the aircraft. And they even shake the controls a little bit so I know that it’s a positive handoff. See how simple that is?

You have the aircraft. They repeat back, I have the aircraft. Or if I was an instructor pilot and I was taking control of the aircraft because the student pilot is doing something stupid, I would just jerk the controls and say, I have the aircraft. I would expect the student pilot to then say, you have the aircraft.

And there is no ambiguity about who’s flying the airplane. This came about because, believe it or not, there have been mistakes in aviation where they’re not sure who’s flying the aircraft. One guy thinks the other guy is flying the aircraft and vice versa, and then you crash or you make big mistakes.

summary of effective leadership practices and the necessity of ongoing effort

But this simple, you have the aircraft, this positive handoff is very important even in your business, and it’s so easy to implement. So there should never be any ambiguity. I see this in teams when people are saying things like, yeah, we should do that, or yeah, let’s do that. Like, it’s a good idea, but who has ownership of that specific thing?

If we just talked about a new marketing initiative and we’re like, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea, either you should clearly say as the leader, that is a good idea. Could you please write up a couple of, you know, scripts on how this would work or a timeline for this project and give it to me by Wednesday, because this will be your responsibility.

And I think it was a great idea. You see, I’m having a positive handoff there. It’s no like, oh, yeah, it’s a good idea. And then like you leave the meeting, you’re like, well, was Jerred, Jerred thought it was a good idea. So was Jerred going to do it or, or was it because it was my idea, I should be doing it.

And believe it or not, that will happen over and over again if you don’t have a very clear positive handoff. Now the second thing that you can do if you are trying to become a more clear communicator, and I tell this to people all the time, is you don’t want to offend somebody. So you have to be careful how you do this next thing I’m going to tell you.

But if you say I need you to do X, Y, and Z by Friday, and say there are a lot of instructions or you know, there’s just a there is not a simple task. It’s not like send this email by Friday, you know, it’s a little bit more involved. So you would communicate this, the task or whatever it is to the person you are delegating it to.

And then I either verbally, which is not my preference, I would have them send it to me in a message format, an email format, that way, we have record of it. And then I would say, Hey, I need you to send me basically what you think I just assigned you. That way, we’re very clear about what it is that’s going to happen and when.

So again, you’re not trying to insult anybody’s intelligence. But one, it very quickly makes people pay more attention to you when you are speaking when you are delegating tasks, because they know they’re going to basically have to rewrite this crap and send it to you. It also helps you avoid questions.

You know, if you’ve ever been in a leadership situation, it’s not that you don’t want to answer questions. But to me, I see if I see a lot of questions coming in, I don’t see it as an annoyance. I see it as a failure on my end to have properly communicated in the first place. So if I hand off a project, and I’m getting 47,000 questions, I did not equip the person or I selected the wrong person for the job when they’re asking all of these questions.

And so my preference is, how can I make sure that they are very clearly supported and they know exactly what they’re doing to where the questions will be minimal? Not that I don’t want any questions, but I don’t want to question every 15 minutes throughout the entire day because I wasn’t clear or they’re not 100% clear on what they’re doing.

So again, two quick things, one, a positive handoff. You have the aircraft, I have the aircraft. So leave no ambiguity in meetings about who’s doing what. If you ever feel like there’s something that’s like, it’s kind of out there, we’re not sure who said it, you’re the leader, go ahead and communicate, hey, you, you are responsible for this thing.

It’s due by this date. Then the second thing, I want you to email me what it is that we just talked about. So you can give me the who, what, when, where, why, and how of what we just discussed. And that way I have record of it and I know that you fully understand what we’re talking about and what we’re doing.

Now you don’t have to always do this, but if you are struggling with delegation or you feel like you’re not properly communicating, these are two really powerful tasks that can help you in your leadership efforts and your delegation efforts. But like I said, leadership is not easy and if you want to master it, that will never happen.

All you can do is try harder.