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?
