Delegate the outcome
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In 2006, as a first-time CEO, I decided to host a lunch series for clients.
An industry we all had an interest in was being disrupted, and those lunches were designed to be the place where we would agree how to co-invest and take advantage of what was coming. Small rooms, the right people and conversations that went somewhere. I had thought carefully about who belonged in the room and why.
I found a catering company. They quoted and on paper it looked excellent.
On the day they arrived late. The food came out cold. They apologised profusely, but it (literally) left a bad taste in the mouths of my clients.
That debacle was on me.
I delegated a task and never described the outcome. Given their price, website and apparent expertise, I assumed they would know what to do. What I owed them was the shape of the thing I wanted: how each client should feel walking into that room, and how they should feel walking out of it after an immersive couple of hours.
If delegation created leverage…
If delegation creates leverage, why do so many leaders have so little of it?
That question plagues CEOs and senior leaders, because in their own minds they have played the strategy and their expectations to their teams like a broken record. Then comes ‘what I need from you is…’ or ‘I’d like you to look after this…’. It is followed with questions to check the ask is understood, there's often nodding, and it looks like the thing that should take work off a CEO's plate.
From the outside it looks like delegation.
Weeks pass. Months pass. Still no leverage.
The easy explanation is comprehension. The CEO was not clear enough, or the person understood the brief in the room and had more questions that were never asked after they left. Sometimes that is what happened but often, but often I think it’s something more fundamental.
Think about the last time you delegated something. What was it?
There’s a good chance it was a task, and that you walked the person through a process hoping they would follow it the way you would have followed it, so the result would arrive looking the way it would have looked had you done it yourself.
There is a healthy element of control in that ask. It also costs you twice.
The first cost is that you have asked an expensive person to be a version of you. The second is that you have closed the door on your own request being improved. Everything you said was laced with how you wanted it done, which leaves the person in front of you nowhere to add anything of their own experience.
Delegating the outcome
Last month I was in New Zealand to speak at and help guide a leadership event for Southern Cross Healthcare. The planning and the rehearsing were excellent, and the execution was outstanding. I wrote about it here.
The CEO had walked back through the door a day earlier after a month of annual leave. He knew how much rode on that event for his team, and his team nailed it.
He did not delegate the task of planning a leadership event.
He delegated the outcome of a leadership team that walked out informed and engaged for the next important chapter of their strategy.
Outside the special forces commands of most militaries, few people realise how routine this is. A senior officer delivers the commander’s intent, which includes the mission objective. The experienced cadre of operators in the troop then plan, rehearse, review, adjust, and then move to execute.
The intent travels down. The planning and execution stay with the people doing the work.
It took me a long time to see the difference between delegating a task and delegating an outcome. When I finally saw it, I also saw how much leverage I had left sitting on the table and all of it traded away because I believed holding more control was the better option.
Delegating the outcome asks more of you at the start. There is coaching involved, because your team needs the colour and the taste of the outcome you can already see.
Here are the three steps that help you build that muscle and I recommend sharing this with your leaders:
Describe the outcome. Name the condition and feeling you want to be true when the work is done, rather than the deliverable or the milestone. For my lunch series, the outcome was a room of clients who arrived curious and left having agreed how they would co-invest and feeling like they were part of a tight-knit group. The test is whether the person could recognise the finished thing without you standing next to them.
Set the boundaries. Name the few things that genuinely cannot move, which is usually the budget, the date, and a small number of people or reputational constraints. Then say out loud that everything else is theirs. Most of us do this the other way around, leaving the constraints unspoken while prescribing the method.
Take the back-brief. Ask the person to brief the outcome and their plan back to you, in their own words, at a time you agree before your meeting ends. You are not checking whether they were listening. You are finding out whether the outcome you described is the outcome they heard. The direct report who nods in the meeting and goes quiet for a month was never asked to brief anything back.
Being handed an outcome also drives ownership. It pulls thinking and collaboration out of people who would otherwise be waiting on your next instruction, and it lets them step more fully into the role for which you hired them.
You have several expectations of your team
You may have repeatedly talked them through what you need from them and it still hasn’t arrived.
Before that frustration surfaces in a way that’s difficult to walk back, ask yourself whether you delegated a task or an outcome.
If you’re quick to jump to ‘outcome’, that’s a sign you probably delegated a task.
That’s all for this week. See you next Wednesday.
Phil Hayes-St Clair
CEO Coach
PS If this essay helped, Episode 236: What you can achieve in a 6-week reset as a CEO from my podcast is worth a listen. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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