Episode 4: Delegation

Liz and Nelson dig into the art of "Delegation" the different levels of delegation, accountability and why it is vital to your small business.

Tue, 3/22 12:03PM • 46:58

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

delegate, tasks, delegation, people, person, email, delegating, ownership, week, thought, shannon, assistant, employees, checklist, meeting, process, give, office, hire, leads

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Coveys = https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-People-Powerful/dp/B0006IU4C0/ref=sr_1_1?crid=XLSCRUNNK3T7&keywords=7+habits+of+highly+effective+people&qid=1645210962&s=audible&sprefix=7+hab%2Caudible%2C106&sr=1-1

SPEAKERS

Liz Sears, Nelson Barss

Liz Sears 00:01

Welcome to the Business greater than you podcast, where we dive deep into the stories of men and women who have successfully transcended the fragile solopreneur life and built protective teams with better lifestyle and income.

Nelson Barss 00:13

I'm Nelson bars, the founder and owner of Utah Independent Mortgage Corp.

Liz Sears 00:18

And I'm Liz Sears, founder and co owner of My Utah Agents.

Nelson Barss 00:21

We're excited for you to listen, interact and grow. So please share your comments below. And let's get started. Alright, welcome back. Liz, I'm excited to talk to you today about delegation,

Liz Sears 00:37

The piece that makes our lives easier. I love this part. I'm actually really excited to talk about delegation.

Nelson Barss 00:42

It sounds so easy, but it's it's not always easy.

Liz Sears 00:45

No. And if you do it wrong a couple times you get gun shy, and then you kind of get to become one of those people who are like, nevermind, I'll do it myself.

Nelson Barss 00:53

Yeah. Or your like it takes me so long to teach this, I'd rather just get it done.

Liz Sears 00:57

I could get it done way faster if I just do it myself.

Nelson Barss 00:59

Yeah,

Liz Sears 01:00

totally true. The first couple times.

Nelson Barss 01:02

So we've gone through the process of of hiring someone, we talked about onboarding and training and now now they're with us, and it's time to give them some tasks, some jobs, some ownership.

Liz Sears 01:14

Yep.

Nelson Barss 01:14

And we want to go through how we do that, what we've learned how we've succeeded and failed. In First of all, I think it might be nice to just get

Liz Sears 01:23

I think it was failed and failed and failed. And succeeded

Nelson Barss 01:28

I think some people on my team would still argue that

Liz Sears 01:31

still failing,

Nelson Barss 01:32

waiting to succeed.

Liz Sears 01:33

the John Maxwell concept,

Nelson Barss 01:35

you know, I was thinking about this, I have a couple of different types of employees, then I delegate differently to, right. And let's talk about the spectrum different different levels of delegation. We talked about this before the low level delegation, sometimes you'll hear it referred to as gofer delegation, right? It's, hey, go get this for me. Don't do this one thing, gofer this. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, the high level delegation is complete ownership.

Liz Sears 02:03

Right,

Nelson Barss 02:03

which also comes

Liz Sears 02:04

were their making decisions for you. They're representing you.

Nelson Barss 02:06

Yeah. And accountability. Right?

Liz Sears 02:08

Yeah.

Nelson Barss 02:08

And we'll talk about accountability as a big part of this process. But I have employees that are just the nature of their job, for example, my assistant sometimes does get gofer assignments.

Liz Sears 02:23

You know, what, actually, I have found that almost everyone in the company at a point or two in time, might have a gofer, right delegation. And if we don't set the stage to begin with have, you know, that may happen, and we just need you to do it. But then sometimes you can get pushed back. I'm above that. I shouldn't have to write that great, right?

Nelson Barss 02:44

Well, and I feel bad, sometimes assigning those type of things to someone, if that wasn't really upfront, like, hey, there's nothing that I am not going to be able to ask you to do. If I need someone to stand by the shredder for six hours and shred one page at a time. So be it right. That's, I just want you to do everything if in fact, one piece of advice I have for somebody, anybody is when you hire somebody tell them that part of their job description is anything that I don't want to do.

Liz Sears 03:10

Right?

Nelson Barss 03:10

Right. If you can get agreement on that. It's It's freeing, right? Because now it's like, Okay, I just really don't want to be the one to do this. So here you go. I'd like to delegate this to you and free myself up for the things that I want to work on. Right.

Liz Sears 03:24

Yeah, exactly.

Nelson Barss 03:25

So low level delegation. I wouldn't say that it's something that we don't ever do. I would say that there's a, there's a right way to do it. Right. And let's start there. And let's talk about, you know, this, this low level, gofer type delegation, and what it takes to do that well, and then we'll transition into the high level ownership type of delegation on bigger tasks and job description, type delegation.

Liz Sears 03:49

Perfect, I love it.

Nelson Barss 03:51

So talk to us a little bit about how you delegate how you make sure you know, a gofer type of task, a low level delegation is still done, right.

Liz Sears 04:00

So when I give tasks to do, a lot of times, what I'll try to do is put it in a written format, I do not like trusting verbal. If I do give a verbal task assignment, then I'll ask them to send it to me an email or slack. Slack is what we use internally. And just to, you know, let me know what it was that I had delegated, so that we're on the same page. And it's really easy to do that actually will be in passing and I'll say, Hey, can you shoot me an email for that? Actually, I guess email is more often what I use for delegation. I literally have, I use Gmail, that's our platform that we have a G Suite for company, and I have a folder called delegate. And then I even have subfolders under that like delegate, you know, Amanda, delegate, Shannon delegate, whatever. So if there's something I'm waiting for back from them, I'll move the email into that folder. And so then periodically I go in and I can see what I'm still waiting on. So after they send it to me in writing, I said, you know to shoot me an email and then have what it was we talked about so that I have that record and then just shoot me another email to it and just say done, or any details that might need to know. And so then I know once I get that I can pull it out of the folder.

Nelson Barss 05:12

I think I missed that a lot. In my business, I'll delegate little things like Kylie, my assistant, my executive assistant, she's great. But when I give her something, I don't always get the Hey, I'm done. Feedback, right? Because I don't ask for it. And she probably doesn't think it's needed. She's like, Yeah, a week later, I'll be like, hey, whatever happened with that? She's like, Oh, yeah, I did that, like a week ago. And I'm like, Ah, but the idea of just saying, hey, check back when it's finished, or show it to me when it's done.

Liz Sears 05:37

Mm hmm.

Nelson Barss 05:38

I think that's an important part like the written part two, I don't know how you use Gmail, though. I can't I can't deal with Gmail.

Liz Sears 05:43

Oh, really?

Nelson Barss 05:44

So frustrating

Liz Sears 05:46

I had somebody give me a crash course on it one time. And

Nelson Barss 05:49

probably know more than I do for sure.

Liz Sears 05:50

It was kind of game changer for me.

Nelson Barss 05:52

Really.

Liz Sears 05:53

You know, it's funny is actually, you know, we like to give parenting advice in here, some marital advice type thing is, I had to have a conversation with my husband one time because I had given him a few things. And he's like, I've got it handled, but then he wouldn't get back to me. And there's, you know, periodically or something wasn't handled, just because nobody has a perfect memory. And so finally, I told them, I'm not micromanaging you I really, this is how my brain thinks my brain is going to hold on to the burden and responsibility of that task until I know it's done. It doesn't let go of it just because I delegated it. And so I need you to just report back, you know, just say, hey, got that taken care of, I don't even care if the text or whatever, just so that way I can see it's done. And as leaders as we start to have a clearer understanding, or record, I should say, of what it is that we've delegated, it actually does bring a lot of peace, being able to just know, those things are.

Nelson Barss 06:49

So I have a horror story to tell you about, about a small task that I delegated. And I did it way wrong. I'd love some coaching.

Liz Sears 06:56

Okay,

Nelson Barss 06:56

what went wrong? Oh, yeah, we'll see. So I, we had our mission and values printed up on a little poster. And they got delivered. And it was sitting there in the office, and I sent a quick email to my office manager. And it's like, I should have brought the email, but it was like, I'd like you to hang these up on either side of the bathrooms. And please take the pictures that are there and put them in the loan managers room. And the next day, I come into the office and the pictures that I thought she would replace, we're still in their place. Like, I guess she didn't get to it. And then I went inside the bathroom. And there's our mission and values sitting there in front of the toilet. I just chuckled. I just chuckled and she had misinterpreted my email. She had moved the wrong picture. Yeah. So then I had to be like, I'm sorry. You know, I meant this and verbally I, I think having done over email was part of the problem. Right? I obviously wasn't wasn't clear enough.

Liz Sears 07:47

Right?

Nelson Barss 07:47

And she didn't feel like she could clarify. For some reason. I think she just wanted to get it done. She didn't want to wait for an answer for me. Or she?

Liz Sears 07:55

Or maybe she thought she understood

Nelson Barss 07:56

she understood it. Yeah. Teach me how to do that better.

Liz Sears 08:00

Perfect. I love this story. Because it's such an awesomely awkward

Nelson Barss 08:04

literally made me laugh. I'm like, oh, okay, actually, maybe I should leave him here, people will memorize them better,

Liz Sears 08:10

right?

Nelson Barss 08:11

On the toilet captive

Liz Sears 08:12

Captive audience there. So I've actually had that happen several times, even between admin where one of them will send what even I read as pretty explicit instructions on how to do a task, and it was done differently. And what I've come to really just recognize is people think so differently than me and differently than you. And so if I'm very particular, which I may or may not have been accused of being more than a million times, then I've found that I need to give even more explicit directions with ending saying, If this doesn't make sense, you know, just ask me type thing. So inviting them to ask. And so if you had an idea of what the picture was, or even if you say the picture to the left of the bathroom door, on the outside, I mean, in that particular instance, you probably I don't know, I guess it would just be whenever I know that I have a particular way I want it done, I will give as much detail as possible. I will not assume that they understand me. I had one situation where I had an assistant back when I very first started doing real estate, and I gave her enough instruction that she could have just ran with it. But because there were additional details that so it was on this file, send this out and that and she's like, but why would I send that out if we're still at this step? And in my head, I was thinking, well, obviously we're not at that step anymore, which is why I'm asking you to do this, but not answering questions that would pop up in their head and actually caused them to not do the task and end up with more questions. So I have found that I will give all of the backstory extra information. I know that they don't know. I don't this doesn't really help with your values in the bathroom. But along with delegation in general, is every single little bit of information that could make their job easier. So they don't have to guess. And they don't have to assume that they're at the next step or assume that this conversation took place. Yeah, and actually makes it feel so much cleaner. The other thing too, is that when somebody delegates to me, and they want me to draw the parallel, or do the deductive reasoning or anything like that, sometimes I've got so much going on in my head, I don't want to, and you don't want to give homework with somebody that you're asking to help you even though technically, you've hired them, and you're paying them to help you, the less homework you can give them, especially if you can resolve it in a 32nd Extra explanation is helpful. Interesting. That was a long answer.

Nelson Barss 10:45

No, I knew you'd have good advice for me. I think it must be so hard on her right? That must have been so frustrating for her. She had to go undo everything she had already done, move all the pictures back. probably felt embarrassed, right, even though it was me that explained it wrong.

Liz Sears 11:01

You did at least tell her in private, right?

Nelson Barss 11:02

Yeah. I'm learning that too. Right? Praise in public. Correct. And private? Yes, I'm learning that.

Liz Sears 11:09

And also, every time I correct which, with delegation, you have to do tons of correction, because nobody's going to get it right the first time. And so one of the things we do with delegation, too, is we just say, you're, you're going to have questions, you might screw things up, you know, with screw in, you know, quotations and is just that. I will take almost all responsibility for that, that I didn't explain it well enough. I didn't train well enough. I didn't provide the systems well enough. And so long as you keep trying, this is totally going to work.

Nelson Barss 11:43

Yeah. Yeah. And you almost have to reinforce a lot in the beginning. Especially. Yeah, you're gonna correct. You need to be on solid footing.

Liz Sears 11:51

Yeah. And lots of compliments about the parts they do. Right.

Nelson Barss 11:54

I had a this week, a little. I would say failing when it comes to correction.

Liz Sears 12:01

Yeah?

Nelson Barss 12:03

And I'm, I'm learning that when I try to see how these things are building, oh, my goodness, it was bad. And I'll share the story. But, but where I went wrong is that I tried to correct something quickly, like I only had I had my day was packed. I was in between meetings, I was standing at the door to my office.

Liz Sears 12:20

And you're probably like, if I don't do it now, I'm not going to

Nelson Barss 12:22

exactly and my next point was already sitting in my office. And so the person needed to correct was 15 feet away. So of course, I had to yell to get her attention, right. So she felt like she was getting yelled at. I didn't mean to yell at her. But she just happened. Yeah, across the room

Liz Sears 12:38

feel like I needed to talk louder,

Nelson Barss 12:39

right? And then that she was sitting there amongst all her co workers. And it was like, not how I didn't intend to yell at her. I just intended to say, hey, you know, let's do it this way. Let's do this way. And then I closed my door, and went on with my meeting.

Liz Sears 12:54

Yeah.

Nelson Barss 12:55

And I kind of felt as I was sitting down with the next meeting. Oh, that that didn't go right.

Liz Sears 12:59

Yeah.

Nelson Barss 12:59

And of course, she had to sit there in the ice cold office after I closed the door. And everybody's like, what just happened? Why is Nelson so mad at you?

Liz Sears 13:08

Especially because you're such a soft spoken person?

Nelson Barss 13:11

Yeah, I literally just heat of the moment. It's the same thing with this delegating with the pictures, it was heat of the moment, I want to do it in a 10 second email, in stead of a 2 minute conversation,

Liz Sears 13:20

especially because we always have so many things we're getting done. They're friggin done, done, done. That's how.

Nelson Barss 13:25

So so what I think I think what I have learned from these two experiences is don't try to squeeze something in to the wrong size moment. Right,

Liz Sears 13:36

right

Nelson Barss 13:37

a 22nd in between meetings is not the time to correct somebody. And especially if they're across the office, and it sounds like you're yelling at them,

Liz Sears 13:45

right?

Nelson Barss 13:45

Because, you know, she really struggled with that she was really upset. And she wasn't fair to her. And the other thing I've learned is if I can do it in person, instead of over email, I'd be better off right? Verbally, there's so much more context. So you know that that email I sent to my office manager was done after hours. I didn't, I didn't want to try to figure out a moment when we'd be together. But I do have a meeting with her every morning. We started the morning off with a 15 minute meeting, in hindsight, you're like I could have waited, I could have added that to my little checklist to go over with her morning. And it would have taken me 30 seconds to delegate that with her. So I think email and 20 second conversations are bad ways to delegate.

Liz Sears 14:25

Yeah, or give feedback on delegation. So yeah, I've had several of those where I gave bad feedback after delegating something. And so one of my experiences was an assistant who's been with me for 16-17 years now. And when Shannon and I teamed up, she had been so insanely competent with everything before that I assumed that she would be competent with these changes that we were making, without even really thinking through the fact that this is a completely new dynamic. I'm having tons of conversations that she's not privy to. And so as I'm delegating things to her, I'm so used to her being able to read my mind. And now, I didn't realize that by having a conversation and making a decision with someone else's input. Now it's out of alignment with what she's used to. And as I would give her feedback, or ask her to do things, and it wasn't happening, I was not sandwiching my feedback with the delegation, I was just saying, hey, that, you know, this is what happened. This is how it impacted me this is you know, what I'd like to see instead, you know, the same three steps I say a lot. And I wasn't prefacing it with Hey, you did really awesome on that one piece. I'm this one here, I'd like it done this different way, et cetera. And so she started feeling really just, you did wrong, you did wrong. You did wrong over over over. And that is just a really good way to like, break someone. Yeah. And it was really sad how it kind of collapsed for a while were awesome again, but but it was, it was a really a sad time to realize that just because I'm under the gun, just because I have a lot on my plate. Just because I might feel stressed does not make it logical possible. Right. Anything for me to not do the work it takes to be a good leader.

Nelson Barss 16:18

Yeah. And maybe the time it takes, right,

Liz Sears 16:20

right. So let's go ahead and start talking about the time and the steps. And so some of the things about delegation that I was thinking of is just like, how do you approach like teaching somebody how to do something?

Nelson Barss 16:34

Yeah, we talked about this a little bit in the training and onboarding thing. But I think we talked about the I do we do you do process, right? In my office, we have this watch and do checklists, where we want someone to watch a task a few times, and then do it while someone watches a few times before they're on their own. Right? Right. It's an investment, I don't care. You know, this is why sometimes we don't want to delegate because it's, it is always gonna be quicker to do yourself. Right in the moment, right? And you have to just appreciate the fact that you're investing in your future, you're taking the time to do the work together, and then to watch them do it and and then you will have more time, then the dividends come. Right.

Liz Sears 17:15

Right.

Nelson Barss 17:16

And you guys do that in your office as well. Right? The I do we do? You do?

Liz Sears 17:20

Yeah. And it's worked really, really well. So yeah, at our office, we've done that approach a lot. And so for one example, a common thing that we have one of our assistants do is help us with our email, because there's tons of stuff that come in the email that I really don't need to see, there's a lot of spam or there's something about a particular file that they can just forward on to the transaction coordinator, or they could you know, whatever might need to happen coordinate with title. And there's even some stuff where it's just put it on my calendar, and then they're supposed to just look at my calendar, see if it's there. So we'll sit down and like say, Here's how to go through my email. These are the type of things to handle, here's where you send it. And so they'll watch me go through it, and then we'll do it together. And then they'll do it on their own. And I'll go back and double check. And they're supposed to make notes of it. Scheduling lunches.

Nelson Barss 18:09

What a game changer by the way.

Liz Sears 18:10

Yeah,

Nelson Barss 18:11

delegating your email,

Liz Sears 18:12

oh, my Gosh, right!

Nelson Barss 18:15

and saying how much time we waste? Yeah, staring at email, we think we're working. We default back to it every 20 minutes, right? It's I go back to my inbox back to my inbox. And you almost live prisoner to it all day long,

Liz Sears 18:27

right.

Nelson Barss 18:28

And as soon as I was able to delegate my email, and I have an assistant who watches my email all day long, she does just what you said, right?

Liz Sears 18:34

Yep.

Nelson Barss 18:35

But the way to delegate that it's not just a quick Hey, who, what, where, when, how, why, right, that might work for moving pictures around the office, mentally go through that checklist, the five W's but

Liz Sears 18:47

yep,

Nelson Barss 18:48

this now we're moving towards a higher level of delegation. This is ownership of something right ownership of my inbox. So you said, you spent some time showing them, right, they watched you check your email for a while, that's what I do

Liz Sears 19:02

Oh, let's even say this. Sometimes what I'll do is I'll say hop on a zoom call with me. And then I record the Zoom call. And I'll do it and they'll watch and then I'll say, Okay, watch the recording and type up the

Nelson Barss 19:13

process.

Liz Sears 19:14

So here's one thing with the delegation is, it's kind of ties back into the hit by the bus book. And because any tasks that you're going to delegate, they need to have clear instructions for so if your assistance, something happened to them, you know, terrible example, I used a moment ago, but let's say they got sick, you know, or something happened, they needed to quit. We want somebody to be able to step in and do it. So our operations manual, at least the pieces that are built out fully, have a video instruction, which, you know, we can just do a zoom call, they have the written instruction, which we asked them to type up because that'll also identify if they missed any of the pieces. And then any best practices, you know, just like a Word doc that just says, you know, here's why. Here's how here's, you know, what could come up to change it?

Nelson Barss 19:58

I mean, I think I'm just thinking about you're having your assistant write that.

Liz Sears 20:03

Yes.

Nelson Barss 20:03

And I, I mean, my my mentality is Wait, first I gotta write it first I got to build the book before for I can hire the person

Liz Sears 20:11

No, you just have them come in and you're like, okay, here are all the things I want help with this is the best thing is that when you have a really, really good hire, that person is going to come up with ideas to help you too. So kind of back to one of my outages that I teach my children is I tell them, there's two types of employees that suck. Those that will not do what you ask them to do. And those that only do what you ask them to do,

Nelson Barss 20:35

wow,

Liz Sears 20:36

that you need to have somebody who is creative, kind of the topic that I tell them. And maybe this applies in this podcast, maybe not. But I think the whole mentality around it is accurate. As I tell my kids, let's say that you're somebody that goes above and beyond, you do what you're asked, and you do more than what you're asked. And if there's extra money in the budget, and they're giving out raises, who's the one who gets the race, if you're the only one doing it, or you're the one doing it more than anybody else. Or if there's a promotion to be had who gets the promotion as that this is a way to solidify your employment solidify your pay, and your pay increases and things. And so if we teach that to our employees, when they come is that we want them to do what we ask and be a contributor, if they see a way to do it better, faster, easier, whatever. As I'm showing them, my process, if they can see wait Liz is doing it the hard way, maybe there's an easier way to do this, I want those ideas. I'm gonna champion and be so excited for anything you bring to the table.

Nelson Barss 21:33

I love it. Yeah, nothing better to see. And I think this goes along with ownership too, right? So we're transitioning down the spectrum to this higher level of delegation where you've got someone and you've given them ownership of a, of an entire piece of your business.

Liz Sears 21:48

Yeah,

Nelson Barss 21:49

you know, whether it's your email for me, I have an assistant who is she owns my leads. Okay, so she's a front end assistant, she takes every lead, and she follows up with them over and over again, until they come and sit down with me at my desk

Liz Sears 22:03

till they buy or die.

Nelson Barss 22:05

Pretty much. She also needs to give feedback to the person who referred the lead, right? And she's just, she's great. But what I've loved to see is that she's taking that piece. And she's building out the checklist of what it means to own a lead. And every time I notice something that got missed, she's like, I'm adding that to my checklist. And she's got this humongous spreadsheet, and she's just adding to it. This is what you're talking about. Right?

Liz Sears 22:29

Right. Yeah,

Nelson Barss 22:29

seeing somebody just grab that and build it themselves. And that's where ownership comes from. Right? When they're part of creating the process.

Liz Sears 22:38

They love to see. So there's, I was talking to somebody the other day about having an employee that takes ownership of their role. And I was talking to someone else. And they said, Well, how do you quantify that? How do you identify that? How do you work? I don't even know what you mean that that's so conceptual to me. And I think it really boils down to somebody who loves it so much that they can take the job that they have, and they want to make it better, that they're looking for ways to grow it to improve it to, to have it become more than what it was when you gave it to them. Yeah. And this is where having the right person in the right seat on the bus makes all the difference. Because something that you're good at, you can't help but like, for reals. And so if we put somebody in the right position, then they're going to naturally want to do that anyways,

Nelson Barss 23:22

right? It's fun to win. Right? Right. Yeah, on a winning team to be succeeding and to be exceeding the expectations

Liz Sears 23:28

and to be totally contributing to that success. It's such a rewarding feeling.

Nelson Barss 23:32

And I think, along with ownership, so this this type of delegation, you have to also be willing to let go, so that you can hold that person accountable. One of my problems has been, I can't give anyone accountability, because I'm too in the process with them still, I'm still needling them, I'm still change this, fix that, do a different, you know, you're gonna you're about to drop the ball, let me get underneath and hold it so that you don't drop it. And when you're like that, there's no level of accountability. They don't feel it, they don't feel responsible. I can't say to them, Hey, I need you to do better, right? I just doesn't even come out of my mouth. Because I know.

Liz Sears 24:08

And besides the term better is conceptual again,

Nelson Barss 24:11

here you go. Yeah. How do you measure it? Right.

Liz Sears 24:14

So one of the questions we had talked about is what does done look like? So how do you communicate

Nelson Barss 24:19

What does done look like?

Liz Sears 24:20

What does done? So you give a task? And you say, what is it and you have to explain to them? What does done look like? So what are some of the ways that you've done that?

Nelson Barss 24:28

Well, for example, the well I didn't do very well with my picture. But right with my friend and assistant, we call we call our pre approval specialist. What done looks like is 35% of our leads are converted and closed. Right? So we can track that but she doesn't really feel accountable to that number if I'm too involved in the whole process. Right?

Liz Sears 24:55

Because then if it fails or succeeds, she can still blame you

Nelson Barss 24:58

and part of the version is me. So maybe a better metric for her would be 50% of our leads meet with me. And that's her conversion is a lead to a consultation with Nelson. That's, that's her game. That's the game, she can win. And she can control and she can manage and track.

Liz Sears 25:16

Yep. So if we get clear, when we go to delegate something, first, make sure we're delegating to the right person, make sure that they have the right skill set, desire to do the type of tasks that we're assigning them. And this is one of the things that I loved, like really just embracing the concept of every single task that exists that I hate to do. There's some lunatic out there who loves it. A lot of people out there that think I'm a lunatic for the things that I really love. Like I, I love contract negotiation, especially if it gets heated because I just think it's fun to like come to a win with a solution when nobody thinks there's a possible way. See, people think that yeah, but when we can find what their strength is and delegate to that, and then get really clear on what done looks like.

Nelson Barss 26:00

I like that.

Liz Sears 26:01

Yeah,

Nelson Barss 26:01

so painting a picture, a visual picture, a numeric picture, some kind of obvious, this, you know, is coming to my mind is, if you've ever read Stephen R, Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, he brings his son out to teach him how to mow the grass, but he doesn't get into the weeds or I don't have to say get in the weeds. It doesn't go specific. He says, clean and green. Yep, I want it to be clean and green. And then he left. And he let his son decide everything else. And there's a whole lot of story about that.

Liz Sears 26:32

Yeah, he did show some examples of what Yeah, even green looks like

Nelson Barss 26:35

yeah, this is what you're getting right

Liz Sears 26:37

like that.

Nelson Barss 26:37

Yeah.

Liz Sears 26:39

I love that. So um, and then also, I have found that you got to give a deadline. It can't just be pie in the sky. I've found a lot of my successful delegation is I will say how long I think it'll take and then say, How long do you think it will take? Or like one I just did. A month ago, I actually said, I would like to have a new Google Calendar made with all of the team members birthdays that I can click to view or not view. And then at a glance, I can see boom, all the birthdays right there. And I prefaced that Delegated Task with this is not urgent, but I would like it done within the next month. Let me know when you think you can do it. And she came back and said I could have it done in a week. I said, Okay, great. And then I added a reminder, so then it popped back up for me to check in on it and see where we're at, which came up today.

Nelson Barss 27:26

You know, it's funny, I love that, because I'll do that. Sometimes I'll delegate something like that. But I don't say it's not urgent. And I'll find the person dropping everything.

Liz Sears 27:33

Yeah,

Nelson Barss 27:34

to create the Google Calendar.

Liz Sears 27:35

Yeah,

Nelson Barss 27:36

just because it was the most recent thing.

Liz Sears 27:37

Yep. So it's in really, really clear that we are it's really, really important that we communicate if it's a high, medium or low priority, or if there's a time limit on when it ought to be done.

Nelson Barss 27:51

So can we talk about this, the higher higher level of delegation, you know, getting to a point on your team, where some something even the entire process can happen without you. Can you think of some examples of where you've seen that happen in your business and tell us how you got there?

Liz Sears 28:09

Yep. So again, it's it's getting somebody who wants to be creative, who wants to be a contributor. And I have found that in order to have the right person, you have to have also made it safe for them to fail. If you don't make it safe for them to fail, you're not going to get somebody who's going to really show up the way they need to. And before getting into that, I want to tell this one story, because it just prefaces the whole mentality that you've got to have behind it. There was a guy who won a Pulitzer Prize, I think it was. And it was something where he had been very creative. And somebody asked him once, how he was able to, you know, just try so many things. And he said that he attributed it to his mom, when he was a toddler. He's like, three, four years old, and he went to get a gallon of milk out of the fridge and dropped it and it broke and spilled all over the floor. And his mom said, Well, it's already on the floor, we might as well play in it. And they played in the milk on the floor, like what parent does that, nobody ya know. And then she said, all right, well,

Nelson Barss 29:13

very wise parents,

Liz Sears 29:14

a very wise parents. She said, Okay, well, let's clean it up. And she taught him how to clean it up. And then she said, Well, you learned how not to get the milk out of the fridge with little hands. Why don't we go practice the right way. And she just filled a jug up with water went outside and taught him how to do that. So he learned that it's okay to make mistakes. It's okay to play in it and you just got to clean it up and move on. And so as you're grooming somebody, starting with go for starting with more important stuff to get up to that point. If they make a mistake, you know, screw things up. And to treat it more as well. There's the mess. What are we going to do with it? Let's go ahead and take care of it and don't treat it like it's a reason for reprimand. Don't treat it as though it's a reason for guilt, or shame or all of those emotions that often come with it. Just looking at the options that are now available, then when you get to the point where you have the higher level things that you give them, you can start to say, Okay, here's the project we want to do. So for us, one of the things was revamping floor time, floor time is just the calls that come in, you know, the leads we pay for and the leads we generate, who's going to answer them? And so we did a mini group and had this person sit in, and then we said, okay, what are you gonna do with all the content? We just got out of this meeting? And she's like, Well, I think I'll do this and this, and we'll try this and that. And she ran with it. And then she came back, and she would give us feedback. And within a month, we had nothing to do with it. And that was the very first thing that was truly functioning without Shannon, me involved. And we're like, oh, my gosh, next level, here we go. And then we started doing with more. So how about you? What's, what's some of the steps you've taken for that?

Nelson Barss 30:49

Yeah, I would agree. I think a lot of the things that have really worked for me were when I was really small. And I brought people in, and they helped build the process. Right? Like, yeah, they had ownership from the very beginning. It wasn't, it wasn't, like I joked earlier, I want to have the handbook ready on day one, and say, here's how we do it. And then the more advanced we've gotten, and the more we have all these nail down processes, and we try to hire someone and plug them in, and they just need to be a robot. It doesn't work. It works. When they come in, and they get to be part of the team, then, and they get to contribute their own knowledge and skills. And their course they have to be the right kind of person they have to be you have to, you know, one thing we've learned is that if you hire, you know, these, these experienced, intelligent, sharp people, and they they don't need as much checklist definition as the others, right? What's working really well in my office is the the back end process, the delegation of, you know, I've met with my client, we've locked their loan, and now it's time to process takes a month to go to closing. And we have

Liz Sears 31:56

or 3 weeks.

Nelson Barss 31:57

Yeah, it take some people a month, not us. We have loan managers who who do the loan officers job from that point to closing, they're not processors, they don't do the process. What they do is everything that I would do, if I didn't have a Loan Manager, right,

Liz Sears 32:16

yep.

Nelson Barss 32:16

And that's the way I explained it when I hired our first girl Danna, and she, you know, worked very closely with me and, and learned how I did it and shadowed and watched and built her own process. And it has been such a game breaker for us, because it's total trust, it's total ownership. And it's easy to measure whether the customer is happy or not, whether it closed on time or not. But as far as you know, I didn't do a whole lot of micromanaging for her. And she has been a rock star from day one with that process. And it's freeing, it's freeing. I don't have to say hey, to did you order that appraisal, Hey, did you call the client this week did ya, blah, blah, blah.

Liz Sears 32:53

I think another thing that kind of goes along with that is that if you wanted to know if an appraisal was ordered, or if you wanted to know, if the client was called it's logged somewhere, isn't it? So that's the other piece of delegation is having somewhere where the progress of a task is logged, or the progress of project is documented so that at any point in time, you can get a pretty decent idea of where it's at.

Nelson Barss 33:15

Yeah, we created a tracking system, you know, they process the files in our loan system, but we spit out a report in real time that shows, you know which loans are behind schedule, which are ahead of schedule. And, and they she uses it for her own sake, every day, she'll pull it out and say, Okay, this one is a day behind schedule, and she'll work on it's not even me managing it's just a tool for her. And that's how we run our pipeline meeting. Every week, we have this report, we have these, you know, they turn red if they're behind schedule, it's just a simple way. But yeah, I think I'm finding that it's been easier for me to do that the ownership piece to give somebody full ownership of a segment of the business than it is for me to do the little delegation. Um,

Liz Sears 33:59

yeah,

Nelson Barss 34:00

I'm actually having a harder time with the low level. One task, hey, we need to plan a party or something like that.

Liz Sears 34:06

Right.

Nelson Barss 34:06

I don't give enough clarity. And so, you know, they feel like that it come back to me every other day for more information.

Liz Sears 34:12

Yeah, can I share now that you talked about planning a party like a total bomb failure on delegation. So we hired a new person about a month and a half ago, and she came into the role and the person that we had in the role before wasn't the right fit. And none of us really realized it and it wasn't happy. And that was one that mutually ended, which was nice. Got this new person in there. And within a week, week and a half, she was already doing the job at the same level as the previous person simply because the skill set and the desire those types of tasks aligned and not to say there's anything wrong with the previous person her. She just didn't enjoy those type of tasks, which means she was not the right person for that job. But you know, we learned As we go in, she came in and oh my gosh, she took so much ownership and she was running with it. And we started planning our client event. And so with planning this client event, she said, Well, I've got some really good ideas. Do you mind if I just kind of help take charge of it and said, I said, that'd be great. Well, everybody heard that. So everybody stopped helping. And none of us realize that all that fell on this poor brand new person's plate. And then it was the week before the event. And we had another meeting, and Shannon and I were each going on business trips, and vacations and things like that. So we both thought the other one was handling it, we both thought the admin staff was handling it. And Shannon shows up, it's like five days before and no, it's not put together well enough at all. This poor girl never been to one of our events. She didn't know the level that we do our events. And luckily, we got rained out. So we had to postpone it two weeks. And yeah, it was like, Oh, thank you God, crying on our parade here, because we needed it. And so now everything is fine. But we all learned that even with bigger delegation things, we've got to have very, very good communication. So that particular one. And the other thing too, is she did not volunteer to take on the whole project. But everybody chose to kind of interpret that's what it was. And in hindsight, it probably was mostly Shannon's and my fault. We didn't make sure that she had the support she needed, and we didn't assign it to anybody else. And so that, again, comes back to leadership.

Nelson Barss 36:33

It sounds like a theme we got going on here, right? This would be a podcast where we just share all the ways we've learned

Liz Sears 36:39

All the ways we've done it wrong.

Nelson Barss 36:40

Yeah, I am. Is there? Is there a technological solution to some of this delegation, we've tried a few things like, I think there's like, Monday.com we tried, we tried task lists inside of Microsoft Outlook and things. And we always give up on them pretty quick, because they get outdated and things but right, I would love to just have a centralized list of tasks that I can add to and prioritize for my team. And we could talk about it up on a board somewhere together. Have you done anything like that?

Liz Sears 37:11

Um, no,

Nelson Barss 37:14

Cause use your gmail, like you said, I love that.

Liz Sears 37:17

Yeah, our head admin. Like our Director of Operations, that's her new title, and has something like that, where she has a list of projects that she's completed, you know, as she completes them she has in progress, and then she has not yet started. And then she keeps track of where she's at. And mine is kind of similar, but as a leadership, okay, let me just kind of break down a little bit of stuff. So Shannon, and I originally, were attending each of the meetings with each admin employee, to say, okay, with what you're in charge of transaction coordinating with what you're in charge of the financials with what you're in charge of, you know, done and that we would go through everything? Where are you at? What's your big goal for the week, we always start off with good news, because you know, or joke or something like that, go through the projects, and we pull up our notes from last time. So we could see kind of, you know, the running trend of this. And then it got to a point where we had enough employees that we got too busy. And so then our admin that we had elevated to, you know, kind of be a little bit more over operations. And she started attending all those meetings, following the agenda we had set, referring back to the notes that she had from last time, and then she would compile an agenda for our leadership meeting. Wow. And so with that leadership meeting, then we would get the insight of what's going on in different departments. That's been really good. Although we delegated wrongly, to her, where we gave her some of the responsibility, but we didn't give her the authority to do it the right way. So that was another lesson that we learned with delegation at this higher level, is that it's got to be done, not just with the responsibility, but also with the authority. And so we had to go back and kind of build her up in the team size. And so

Nelson Barss 39:05

yeah, make sense,

Liz Sears 39:06

had to explain to the team why we had elevated her, you know,

Nelson Barss 39:10

oh, that's very helpful. I can think of a lot of tasks that would have been easier for my office manager, if I had taken the time to make sure she had the authority to really do this

Liz Sears 39:19

everybody else knew she had authprity

Nelson Barss 39:20

they recognized her authority, because she's probably felt like she had to kind of get that authority. Yeah, through some kind of force of her own. Right. She, by the way, that's one thing I love is when you've got somebody who you're giving a lot of tasks to, and you see them create their own way of managing their tasks, right. She's got this great checklist, she uses her technology, but I've always I've always asked, and I love to see when an employee comes to me and says, Okay, you've given me a lot. Can you help me prioritize this list? And I've asked them to do that. Because I don't want them to guess like, oh, yeah, the, you know, the, the one that you just emailed me about is the one I'm going to do the Google Calendar, your suppose to create. All right. So so often they'll come and say, Okay, here's my huge list of everything you've given me over the last two weeks that I haven't gotten to yet help me prioritize, tell me the top three things that I need to be working on.

Liz Sears 40:11

And you know, what's nice about doing that, too, is that the more often that you'll go through the list with them, the more often that you'll put all of it down, is they'll start to recognize what's the pattern, you know, if I have these type of tasks on here, I now know those ones always need to be top priority.

Nelson Barss 40:26

And oftentimes, she'll bring out her list. We just did this a week ago. And we crossed half things off, like, Oh, that was a month ago when we don't need that anymore, or someone else already did that. Right. I already did that. Yeah.

Liz Sears 40:40

So the return on investment, how many times do we so this is something that I'm currently working on right now, I have hundreds of papers, that's probably exaggerating, but probably at least 20 papers of notes, you know, like full pages of notes of things that I've jotted down tasks I need to do, or different things like that, or people to reach out to. And so what I'm working on now, is going through, and now I need to also teach the people I've delegated to, to do the same thing is, is the return on investment, at least to if my effort I have to put in to do this task doesn't generate me twice as much benefit, it probably shouldn't be on my list at all, even if it's a good thing, even if it would accomplish something good. If my investment is not sufficient to get me at least double the reward, I have to start eliminating things off my plate. So another thing that I've realized is by me keeping all of these tasks I'm part of my investment now is I have to sort through all these tasks every time I tried to decide what are my top priorities, so I'm making investment on tasks, I never even freaking done.

Nelson Barss 41:47

Yeah,

Liz Sears 41:47

I've never gotten

Nelson Barss 41:48

you never will.

Liz Sears 41:49

And I never will, because they're never going to hit the top of my list. So that's my project for now till the end of the year is to not only go through everything that I have and taper it down. But to get so much more selective of what I put on my list and so much more selective on what I delegate, and I'm starting to invite them to give me pushback. If you don't think the return is there, please question me, because maybe I didn't think it through all the way and I should have. So I'm going to teach you and you're gonna teach me it's a partnership.

Nelson Barss 42:20

So I have a thought in reverse of that. If you ever had your team members try to delegate things back up to you.

Liz Sears 42:26

Yes.

Nelson Barss 42:27

Like delegation not supposed to work that way. You can't delegate up. I get to delegate to you, but you can't. I have an agreement with my office manager. She was She didn't know what to ask permission to buy. Right. And I remember hearing a podcast from Robert Miller. He does the story brand stuff, love his stuff. And I shared with her like, how many zeros are involved? I don't want to be involved in a decision that has two zeros. Okay. $100 decision, a $500 decision. If it has three zeros. I could be involved. Right?

Liz Sears 43:02

Yeah.

Nelson Barss 43:03

And someday I hope to move up to where I'm dealing with five zero decisions and 10 Zero decisions,

Liz Sears 43:08

and you have somebody else that someone else can handle the 100,000

Nelson Barss 43:11

Yeah,

Liz Sears 43:11

I love it.

Nelson Barss 43:12

So right now she she does she makes all the decisions with two zeros or less.

Liz Sears 43:16

Yeah.

Nelson Barss 43:16

And we know that someday, I want to step it up. And I'll not do but I'll walk around the office sometimes. And I'll see Oh, everybody has a new keyboard. I didn't approve that. And I thought, Oh, wait, those are less than two zero decisions or three zero decisions. She has authority to do that. And that's great. Right? That is

Liz Sears 43:32

awesome. I love that.

Nelson Barss 43:33

Yeah. Very good. Well, I think we've, I think we've had a good discussion about delegation. Obviously, this is another part of the game where it's just, it's just growth, right? It's just experience and growth. But what a powerful tool, how it has changed my life, it has really changed my life to to move past the gofer delegation to work toward and it's not an instant thing it takes months and years, to get to this high level delegation where you have team members who can replace you, represent you, speak for you, and who feel pride and ownership in their part of the business.

Liz Sears 44:07

And you know, I think we've probably already talked about this sufficiently. But then again, I don't know if you can ever talk about this sufficiently, is if you want your people to have pride of ownership. If you want your people to take ownership, if you want your people to love their job and love what they're doing. There has to be constant, often, sporadic and specific like congratulations attaboys, this is amazing. Anytime you notice them do anything that is beneficial to the business beneficial to you beneficial to a client. You need to be a little fly right here. Anytime that you see them do that you have got to be say, hey, Nelson. Oh my gosh, that was so amazing how you did that. I think that was fantastic. And this is how it impacted to the client, that's totally going to get us more repeat business. I am so grateful that I work with you. I'm so grateful to have you on my team, sending flowers, sending crumble cookies, writing a thank you note leaving it on their desk leaving a balloon and just saying you totally made this person's day you really represent our company well today. It has to be spontaneous as I think, I don't know if I said that word. But all the time, the more that people feel like appreciated and that their efforts make a difference, the more that they're going to want to do that.

Nelson Barss 45:34

I agree. Yeah. And it cannot be overdone. I

Liz Sears 45:37

No it can't

Nelson Barss 45:38

I feel like I do it a lot. And then people say, Well, I feel like all you do is point out the negatives,

Liz Sears 45:43

Right?

Nelson Barss 45:44

And I'm like, Oh, my gosh, I try so hard. I guess I need to do 10 times as much as I'm doing.

Liz Sears 45:49

So one thing that I maybe this is too complicated. I know a lot of people out there would never want to do this approach. But I do have a checklist with everybody on my company on it. And I do try to make sure I do something personal, at least every two weeks. And so and then I just keep notes of how I did it. So trying to watch for when they did something good or trying to just personally connect with them at team meeting or trying to, you know, send them a text or whatever like that. And I'm not as consistent as I want to be yet. But the fact that I try.

Nelson Barss 46:18

I like how you say it has to be spontaneous, right? I think. I mean, you're you're tracking it and you're trying to help yourself, remember to do it.

Liz Sears 46:26

Pay attention to that person for awhile.

Nelson Barss 46:27

It's just a mindset, right? It's just like a gratitude mindset. It's looking for people doing things, right. looking for an excuse to praise and reward.

Liz Sears 46:37

That's really what it is looking for people doing something right expecting to find it actually helps you find it better and opportunities to praise.

Nelson Barss 46:45

Yeah. Well, that's great advice. I'll do it. I'll do better.

Liz Sears 46:48

I'll do better too.

Nelson Barss 46:49

I'll do better. All right. Well, thank you, Liz. Looking forward to the next episode, and we'll sign off now.

Liz Sears 46:55

Me too.

Nelson Barss 46:55

Alright.

Liz Sears 46:55

Yeah. Thanks for listening everyone.