Have you ever spotted yourself assisting your reportee with a banal chore, while getting restless with your child attempting a knotty maths problem? Do you often check condoning your subordinate’s blunders but fail to be amused by your ward’s failed attempt towards novelty?
The modern workplace puts a premium on camaraderie, psychological safety and employee friendliness, often at the cost of a performance culture, standard setting and personal courage.
Double Shift
As a result, managers often get stuck between demanding excellence and being gentle, invoking the parent in them instead of the professional. Back home, the exhausted and hapless parent can’t but chase efficiency and squares up tasks with a managerial flourish.
In an era where most people see their bosses more than their children, employees often find themselves financially stretched and emotionally exhausted. The cost of the pursuit of organizational growth and professional mileage is inadvertently borne by children who ironically need you the most during your vulnerable early stages of career. There’s an age where they switch from wanting you to wanting your money, where you are relegated to an inconvenience, if not an annoyance. Your team, your manager, your organization, on the other hand, might still need you.
Misplaced Roles
When you become a parent at office— offering a long leash even to under-performers, busying self with tasks that you could sleepwalk through, or failing to say a cold no—you are damaging not just your career, but also that of others.
Equally, when you are forced to optimize on every minute spent with your family, the downside is more enduring than most are willing to concede. It’s your ability to be selective on a minute-by-minute basis that offers you any hope of work-life-family balance.
As you encounter a problem, ask yourself three questions: First, is the problem worth it; second, should I do it; and third, can I do it. These are prioritization, delegation and qualification questions, respectively. If the problem is not worth it, then no one, including your subordinate, must be asked to address it. If it is, then you must decide if it demands your attention or that of your subordinate. Never fear delegating, for that’s your sure path to personal growth and empowerment of others. Only if the problem seems to be worth and can’t be delegated must you have a go at it, and if you realize that you are short of competence, develop it.
Most professionals would admit that they seldom follow the checklist and are mostly seen attacking anything that comes in their range. A useful heuristic is: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. This comes down to whether you are deft when it comes to delegation.
Trust Building
Delegation of any kind—upward, downward or sideward—begins by mapping your team on the skill-will matrix, and identifying those who have the commensurate skill and are willing to take on the task. Most delegation collapses because managers rush to hand over the task without ascertaining if the doer is high on skill and will, and this results in rework, loss of time, and erosion of trust. However, never delegate a task at which you can’t afford to fail. Direction is 80% casting—get the right people on the right seat, and keep it impersonal.
Now that we have understood the means of prioritization and the mechanics of delegation, it’s critical to figure out the human engineering that makes people accountable so that you aren’t forced to parent them. Whether someone behaves as a dependent or an inter-dependent person at work stems from professionalism. You must bear in mind that there’s nothing personal here and you mustn’t harbour capitalistic ends with socialistic means. If you wish to make it big, you and others around you must be willing to stretch intellectually, emotionally and physically. Such a performance culture necessitates that people are held accountable for their choices. As you carve out a task, assign the appropriate person, be willing to let the person own the outcome and condone failure. The person must have a ‘skin in the game’ for then only will sincerity emerge. When delegating, take your hands-off, but never your eyes.
As you become more professional at workplace, you will bring back home greater vitality, attention and emotions, and then you will make your limited hours count. No one can be even remotely responsible for your current predicament as you. So, manage your life well, make time for self and family, and stop being a parent at the office.
Pavan Soni is the writer of Design Your Thinking and Design Your Career.
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