IT’S QUICKER TO DO IT MYSELF!

As a boss/manager/owner, yes, it probably is quicker to do it yourself. Sadly, the challenge is that as long as you think that way, you’ll always have to do it yourself!

If you want to have a successful team/department/business (and a life), then doing everything yourself will have some predictable outcomes:

• In the long term, it will affect your health
• It could affect your marriage (or significant relationship)
• It prevents other people learning and growing
• It sends the message that you don’t trust anyone
• It says to your staff that they will never be as smart as you
• People will eventually leave and go elsewhere. Possibly even moving to your competitor and, horror of horrors, maybe taking some of your best clients with them!

It is my aim to free up the time of owners/managers by a minimum of 30%. To show them how to hand over a whole host of routine day-to-day ‘stuff’, so they can work ON their business and not IN it. However, in order to gain that 30%, they need to be willing to delegate! Simple not necessarily easy. Most owners and managers are terrified of delegating because they’re terrified people will make mistakes. And people probably will make mistakes. But how did you the manager/owner learn? By making lots of mistakes!

Not delegating is what I call a but. Buts are fears; and the only way to overcome a fear, is to discover a WIIFM – what’s in this for me? Think about that. What could you be doing differently if you had 30% of your time free of operational problems? Do you think your bottom line might significantly improve if you were:

• Out in the market-place talking to key clients?
• Working on finding new clients and/or markets?
• Brainstorming ideas for new products and services?
• Talking to other business owners about possible alliances or synergies?

A better use of your time? Absolutely. So where do you start?

You start by:

Making a list of all the jobs that bore you out of your brain
Costing out each of those jobs (is this a $15 an hour job – a $25 an hour job or a $50 an hour job?)

You then:

Ask which of your team members would like to put their name by which job
And then you create a plan of action. Easiest jobs first.
Then they watch you do the job, you watch them do the job, they then take over the job with you standing in the wings if they need you!

It’s that simple. As a manager/owner you should not be doing the $15 an hour jobs! Never, never, never.

One small point - please don’t confuse delegation with abdication. You must be willing to support them through the learning process; to coach, guide and mentor. Then when the first task is safely handed over (and don’t be surprised if the person ends up doing the job better than you ever did) you are ready to hand over one more task to one more valued employee; and so on until you have your 30%. Then as an owner/manager/team leader, you will be working where you need to be working, on the strategic issues of your business.

It’s as simple as that.

Yes it will take time – sometimes we have to take small steps backwards to gain a giant leaps forward. Just keep remembering your wiifm - 30% of your time spent more effectively. Be prepared to be very surprised at the results. You will live longer, be happier, stay married longer and as if that wasn’t enough, your bottom line results should have similarly grown by a corresponding 30%!

Trust in your people – in my experience, they will never let you down.

About the Author
Ann Andrews CSP is the author of three books, Shift Your But, Finding the Square Root of a Banana and Did I Really Employ You?

She is also a professional speaker, consultant on human resource issues, and founder of the Teams From Woe To Go franchise.

The above article is one of a series which will take employees and managers through a 6 step process of learning how to seriously improve bottom line results by communicating more effectively with each other. Ann can be contacted at anand@woetogo.com, or visit her website http://www.woetogo.com/.

Cultural Awareness, Self-Awareness

Cultural awareness is the key to building successful international business relationships and should include understanding cultural differences and acting appropriately. No doubt most of you associate this with this with learning about the cultural habits, customs and negotiating styles of the country of the person you are going to be doing business with but this is only one part of the process and certainly not the first.

If you read some of the literature on intercultural or cross-cultural studies, you might get the impression that all you need to do is do a bit of background reading on your target culture/country, perhaps buy a special report on the business style and negotiation tactics there and you’ll be set. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

The problem with this approach is that it immediately sets you up an “Us vs. Them” relationship. The Germans are like this and the Japanese are like this – “they” are unusual, different, the other. This is ultimately quite unhelpful when you come to meet your prospective client because as you’ve already pigeon-holed them you’re likely to miss subtle behavioural clues that don’t confirm your picture of people from that culture. More importantly, although these categorisations of countries and cultures work well at a group level, they break down when confronted by specific individuals. For example, the Japanese businessman who is visiting you from Tokyo may have spent a significant amount of time working or being educated in the USA which may have totally transformed his way of doing business and negotiating.

For me, the first step in cultural awareness is not finding out about other cultures but finding out about yourself: your “myths”, attitudes, beliefs, worldview and stereotypes. This may seem surprising and you may even think that you know all about yourself already but it’s extremely important for the following reasons.

1) You’ll be better prepared to overcome problems in meetings with foreign business people
2) You’ll be a better negotiator
3) You’ll be a better communicator

In short it will give you an edge.

So “How do I find out about myself?”, I hear you ask? You’ll probably be glad to hear it isn’t necessary to meditate on a mountain top for 20 years but you do need to begin a process of personal observation in your encounters with others. We need other people to show us our blind spots and show us more of how we really behave instead of how we like to think we behave. This process can be as simple as asking others for their feedback about us and our behaviour in specific contexts (e.g. at work, at home), to reading books (see suggested reading list at the end of this article) and taking online assessment tests, such as the one contained in this article on EQ.
This step in developing intercultural awareness is probably the most challenging to take as it necessitates a willingness to change and some difficult moments as we uncover uncomfortable truths about ourselves. However, once it is then the other steps in the process of developing cultural awareness - knowledge of the culture, politics, history and business customs of the target culture and skills development in culturally-sensitive verbal and non-verbal communication - are relatively easy to acquire.

Suggested reading:

1) When Cultures Collide by Richard D. Lewis, (Nicholas Brealey, 1999).
2) Riding the Waves of Culture by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (McGrw-Hill, 1998).
3) Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, (Bantam, 1997).


About the author
Neil Urquhart is a communications and intercultural skills trainer who helps individuals and public and private sector organisations win new overseas business through training and consultancy. For the last 14 years he has lived and worked in countries as diverse as Japan, Brazil, Germany and the USA. He is currently based in London.