The Truth About Delegating—A Day in the Life

A board member who attended one of our two-day workshops as a member of a team from an Alzheimer's organization gave us this gem.

We were working on how to help already-overloaded CEOs and development directors, in particular, delegate more of their day-to-day tasks so they could make time for major donor cultivation and asking. Change of any type is often met with significant resistance. Asking people to make changes so they can then take on something that can be scary and new is met with even more resistance. Add to that asking people to confront, systematically, all that is already on their plates, and then to dissect it, hour by hour, item by item. It's enough to have people running out of the room!

Here's how the Day in the Life exercise goes:

We ask each team of seven people from each nonprofit organization—a mixed team of board members, volunteers, and senior staff—to interview the development director and then the CEO, using a "day in the life" format. "Walk us through your typical day," is how they begin. Out pours some pretty funny stuff. We have CEOs talking about how they try to be the first in the office so they can be sure it is clean enough for the guests or clients that day. We have development directors talking about climbing under people's desks to fix their computers. People laugh and people cry. It can get quite intense.

In the course of this exercise, board members get a huge education. Staff realize how much they have taken on that does not require their expertise. Often people see how to juggle accountabilities, what to delegate, and to whom. Many groups come away realizing that, if they are serious about focusing on major gifts, they must make time for it in people's calendars and workloads. They may need to hire new staff or reassign duties to existing staff.

Now let's go back to the board member from the Alzheimer's organization. He was a business consultant in the for-profit world. He kind of chuckled when we got to the part about delegating. He shared with the whole class his company's simple "three list" process for delegating. Here is his gem.

Start by making three lists:

1. List the things you no longer need to be doing that someone else in your organization already knows how to do well.
2. List the things you no longer need to be doing that someone else in your organization could be trained to do.
3. List the things you are doing that you need to keep doing.

Here is how to delegate:

1. For the things on the first list: give them to the person who already knows how to do them well.
2. For the things on the second list, train that person to become accountable for doing those things and eventually give them to that person.
3. Keep doing the things in the third list.

Then we add one further piece to the process from our Benevon distinctions regarding accountability:

• We say that you can't just teach someone how to do a task, turn it over to them, and expect them to do it reliably every time.
• Rather, we say that job or task turnover is not complete until the new person has demonstrated that they are fully accountable for ensuring the task (or project or role) will be performed reliably and consistently to produce the desired result at the level the prior person was performing or better.
• The person giving away the job is accountable for training the new person up to the time the new person demonstrates they can be fully accountable.
• The person giving away the job must set out measurable standards for the new person to meet before the full accountability can be turned over. For example, the new person must produce the targeted result (or weekly report or number of database entries) for three months in a row before the outgoing person officially proclaims the new person "accountable."
• In other words, there is an overlap period of time where the person giving away the job remains accountable for the result even though the new person is technically doing all the work.

We have found that working with these three elements over time makes it much easier for people to delegate job responsibilities, knowing they will be turned over responsibly. The three elements again are:

1. The Day in the Life exercise
2. The three lists of what to give away and what to keep
3. The Benevon distinctions of accountability

For organizations that are truly interested in attaining sustainable funding, this is the depth of organizational change that must take place in order to make the time to focus on major gifts.