It’s a tricky topic, because Green Belts delegate differently depending on the person to whom the task is being delegated, and the nature of the task.

To illustrate, imagine for a moment that you have two employees, and two tasks.  Task A is a critical item while Task B is not.  Wally White and Greta Green are your two employees, and as their names imply, they are White and Green Belts respectively.

Delegating Task B to Greta Green might not require any action other than the initial conversation, due to the nature of the task and Gret’s reliability.

However, delegating Task A to Wally is a risky business. Like most White Belts, he may decide to commit the item to memory in the hope that he’ll remember to undertake the action at a later time.   The chances are high that he’ll simply forget and the item will fall through the cracks of Wally’s system.

A Green Belt manager who is delegating the item won’t sweat it.  He’ll simply place a segment in his schedule to follow-up with Wally.  It might be the day after the item it delegated, or perhaps a week.  Also, the manager who notices that Wally has not written the item down may also send him an email summarizing the action to be taken.  He’s simply upping the odds that Wally will get the task completed.

The manager understands who he’s dealing with in these two cases, and spends no time lamenting the fact that Wally isn’t more like Greta.  Instead, he works with each person at their current level of skill, and changes his actions accordingly.

This tactic clearly involves a judgment call, as life almost never delivers clear-cut examples like the ones I described above.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Tweet This Post  Digg This Post  Stumble This Post 

What do you do when someone makes you a promise that you need to make sure they fulfill?

Here are some options I have seen or tried in the past, none of which I am altogether happy with.

Capturing

Once the initial promise is made, what exactly happens next?  Is it committed to memory, with a hope that things won’t get so crazy that it then gets forgotten?

Or do you send an email to the person (if you can) as a way of putting the promise in writing?

Is it written onto a capture point like a paper pad?

Do the above actions depend on the person who is making the promise and your prior experience?  I have used good Promise Management software to help me in this regard, but it requires proximity to a computer and the intranet.  There may be PDA-based promise management software, but I haven’t found any yet.

Emptying

Whatever enters a capture point must at some point be removed, in keeping with good time management habits.  A promise is a bit difficult to work with, however, as I can’t see a perfect place to out this particular time demand.

Option A:  After Emptying, add it to a list (Listing)

A user could maintain a list of items that have been promised by others, and track the list frequently to ensure that  no promises are being forgotten.  This action of checking the list would have to be placed in a schedule to ensure that it actually gets reviewed, also.

Option B: After Emptying, place a reminder in a schedule (Scheduling)

Place an item in the schedule that acts as a reminder to expect the item by a particular due date.  The item would also need a reminder for this to work, so that it pops up and interrupts the action at the right moment in time.

Neither of these options are elegant, in my opinion, and I’d love to learn some other alternatives.

This strikes me as a hole in my productivity system, and it’s one that I think many share, and would love to solve.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Tweet This Post  Digg This Post  Stumble This Post