My Two Cents_09A

You as an organizational leader are going to want to delegate lower-value work to colleagues who can do it -- not necessarily as well as you, but -- well enough. Competently. The idea is to free yourself up to work on the largest, most pressing issues in your area of responsibility.

The goal of delegating is to maximize your effectiveness.

But our organizations are relatively small. There aren't large pools of potential delegatees. What, then, is the point? How much can "practicing safe delegating" really enhance an organization's overall impact?

Well, London School of Economics' Professor Julian Birkenshaw would have us understand that delegating is one of two ways to offload work. The other is outsourcing. (delegating to outsiders) I happen to believe that outsourcing -- or something like it -- may hold a key to amplifying our whole community's impact. I think it's well worth exploring. 

I'll lay out why in the next four or five posts. 

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When I think of outsiders who may be able to do work on behalf of organizations in the CP sphere, two things jump to mind. One: I think of a vast landscape made up of a larger number of individuals and a smaller number of organizations. Two: If this were fifteen (15) years ago, most of the know-how and know-what associated with said landscape would have been next-to-impossible to access. Today’s communication technologies, however -- our new digital infrastructure -- make all that knowledge "there for the taking." 

The Net opens up a whole new world of possibilities for delegating to outsiders. Those of us in the neurological disorders community aren't even scratching the surface in terms of taking advantage of it. 

I see the outsider landscape as consisting of outside-outsiders and inside-outsiders. Those are only my distinctions, my constructions. But I think they're useful. And I'll characterize them in the next post.

My Two Cents_08

What’s your best “guesstimate” as to the amount of raw work it’s going to take for us to beat CP? Any idea how you’d even express it?

I think it’s going to take more work than most of us would imagine. Way more than our organizations as they’re currently construed could possibly handle on their own. So let’s do something about it. 

Let’s figure out how to get dramatically more work done.

Jerry Hauser and Alison Green, co-authors of Managing to Change the World, say “effective management” is about “getting work done through other people.” What work are they talking about? Ultimately, all the discrete tasks and projects organizations do (or would like to do) in trying to fulfill their missions.

Good managers are good at delegating tasks and projects. We, i.e., the leaders of our organizations whose work revolves around CP, can start here. We need to become master delegators.

“If you can delegate it, you should delegate it.” How many of us operate by that rule? How many of us know which projects or tasks we should delegate to create the greatest organizational benefits?

If we’re to have bigger impact, we’ll need to know these things. The good news is that delegation has the attention of the big-time consultancies I’ve been talking about. I recommend these brief intros to the subject: 

• this Bridgespan piece about Hauser and Green’s work (take special note of their free tools for making it easier to delegate well) 

• this roughly 3-minute video introducing some interesting work done by Julian Birkenshaw (London School of Economics) and Jordan Cohen (PA Consulting) about effectively addressing “the work that matters.”

Next: To whom should you hand your work off?