Making the shift to agency account director
Well, hello and welcome back to this mini-training series on managing others. The reason I put this together was many of my account manager clients are being promoted to account director, and all of a sudden they’ve got to motivate, lead a team. Sometimes they’ve been promoted above their colleagues, so they’re struggling to kind of find their place. Because what initially was kind of a pals-y, pals-y relationship, all of a sudden is very different.
This is part two of a four part video training series
There’s four parts to this. This is the second part, and this part is all about delegation. There’s four parts. The first one was your style, and if you haven’t seen that, please go back and have a look at that. And that’s all about adapting your style to the person’s competence and experience with a task. How to delegate is the section we’re going to be on now. And the following two are going to be how to give feedback to someone and then how to conduct a review.
Choosing the appropriate management style
Your style, just to recap from the previous video, was if you have someone who is relatively new, so this is the person that you’re delegating to on the right-hand side and you’re choosing the style that’s most effective for them.
So if they’re very new to the task, then you have to choose quite a directive style. So you have to be very thorough with your instructions on what you’re expecting them to do. Give them templates, give them something to follow. But it’s very directional. It’s going to be very much about hand holding. The more competent they are, and that’s as they go up the curve, is because they’re more experienced with that particular task.
You can coach them. So you can talk them through the task and then literally, just show them what they need to know. But just keeping sort of a distance from what they’re doing. So you’re not being over control freaky.
And then as they get more experienced with the task, they’ve done it many times, they need less of your help. They certainly don’t need you to be directional. And as we said before, if you are over directional and you’re telling people how to do things, it could be very, very demotivating. So they just probably need your support and guidance. And then finally we’re talking about delegating and this is when you can completely hand off something to someone.
The four Cs of delegating
Let’s talk about delegating. And there are four key steps and I’ve called them the four C’s. Now people do struggle with this, particularly if you’re new to it. And some of the reasons they struggle is you can be overly directional, which is demotivating.
You cannot give enough detail to someone. So you give them such a free rein that they come back and it’s not what you wanted. It doesn’t meet your expectations or perhaps the client’s expectations. And so you end up having to redo it again or going through everything with them again, which is time consuming.
This actually, the art of delegation, is something that will grow and it’s actually practice. The more you get to know your team and understand where they’re at, the easier it’s going to be for you.
C for Clear
So the first C is to be really clear. So the first thing is what is the task? What is my expectations for what needs to be achieved here? Keeping it short, succinct, and quite clear.
C for Context
The second C is context. And this is probably the biggest section and where you’ll be required to give the most information. So this is about putting everything in context, maybe a bit of background to the reason you’re asking them to do the task. Maybe it’s about timings, it’s about urgency versus importance. Maybe you’re giving them a template to follow.
Anything that’s going to help them complete the task. And it could be tips, it could be the fact that you’ve done it before and you know the pitfalls of doing something like this so you can guide them. So whatever context you can give them. So that’s probably the biggest part of this.
C for Confirm understanding
The third C is confirm understanding. And this is so important to get right because many times when you’re asking someone else to do something, they might say, “Yep, yep, yep, yep.” And they give you a sense that everything’s fine and they’ve understood everything and you might think, “Gosh, they’re so confident. Yep, no problem.” And then you just walk away.
What often happens is either you get the work back late, or they don’t do it right properly or very thoroughly or either way you end up panicking at the last minute to try and sort it out. So confirming understanding is a really important step.
C for Completion
And then finally the fourth one is completion. What do you want them to do as soon as they’ve completed the task specifically? So is that you want than to email you something, to come and tap you on the shoulder and tell you that they’ve completed it, interrupt a meeting that you’re in depending on the urgency or importance of the task. So just to help you with this, I’m going to just give you a few examples of just going through this in a bit more detail so you can put it into context.
An example of being clear
Let’s talk about being clear. So this is you on the left-hand side and this is the person you’re delegating to on the right-hand side. So when you’re being clear about something, the first thing you might be thinking about is, “What specifically am I asking him to do? What does a successful completion of a task look like? Has he done this before?” And remember, you’re choosing your style depending on how experienced that person is. “So should I be completely giving him top line information because he’s done this before, he’s experienced, I’m simply delegating it? Or do I have to go into a lot more depth and step by step because I have to be a bit more directional?” So choosing your style is really important.
What it might look like, say you’re going into a teleconference with a client. What specifically will you be saying? So you’ll be saying, “Can you capture the notes from this client teleconference please?” That’s as simple as that. You’re giving the instruction. You don’t have to go into much more detail than that and acknowledge a response.
An example of context
The second point is context. So you might be thinking about, “What’s the background to this? Is there a good example that you could give to him to follow?” Say you’ve done a contact report in the past or you’ve structured and email, which is really good, really clear and thorough. “Could you give him an example so he could follow it?” He might not need that if he’s done this task a million times. So again, thinking about who you’re delegating to and how much information they need and that you’re going to give them.
Also making sure that they’re really, really clear on how urgent is this, how quickly do you need it done. And giving them a chance to say whether there’s a reason why they can’t complete the task, which takes me on to what you actually say.
So you could say something like giving them the background. “This client is prone to changing their mind hence the reason we have to capture everything at every interaction. So I’d like to ensure we capture the conversation in writing. I’m aiming to send this out tomorrow to the client and all the people that attended the meeting.” So you’ve giving them some context. “So I want to see it beforehand so that I can check. Here’s a contact report I’ve done in the past. You can follow. I need it back by 4:00.” And you’re giving yourself enough time to review the work. Because obviously you’ve got to schedule this in with your workload.
An example of confirming understanding
Then confirming understanding. You’ll probably be thinking like, “Has he really understood? He seems confident, but has he missed something?” Maybe just go with your gut feel. What is it feeling like now? So you might say something like, “Have you got any questions? Let’s imagine you’re delegating it back to me or on to somebody else, this task. Just talk me through what your understanding is of the task.”
Now this step of the delegation model is really important because it gives you a chance to see how much they really understood and how clearly those instructions that you gave them are. I mean, I’ve used this example here. But if you can think about this delegation model in the context of delegating anything, then this is probably the most important step because if they really haven’t understood, you’re going to waste a lot of time. If you say get it back to me by 4:00, and then you’ve got an hour to the end of the day really to make any changes you need. So give yourself enough time. If you need it for tomorrow, ask for it in advance today. But get them to talk back to you about what they’ve understood so it’s super clear that they have understood.
An example of completion
And then completion. What do you want to do specific, what do you want them to do specifically at the end of that task. So what is the action that he’s going to take? So you might say something like, “Once you’ve drafted it, can you please send it to be via email to review.” So this is a really simple four step process. But if you keep it in your mind for most delegating tasks, it’s a pretty robust model.
Practice your delegating skills!
And I suppose, finally, it’s important to say that it does take practice to delegate effectively. So keep following the model. Keep trying different methodologies. But ultimately as a leader, as a account manager , the buck stops with you. So you can’t blame anyone for doing anything. Because rarely did they have the intention of doing something wrong. It’s usually because they’re a little bit wooly about the instructions. So this is the responsibility of a leader and it is your job to get it right. So practice makes perfect. Increasing your account manager skills will take some time so don’t stop on trying new methods to be efficient as a leader.
