Facilities management is home to skilled individuals who know their field well, however, not all of them are put in the right places at the right time. Communication is key to getting these individuals to where they belong. Similarly, communication also plays a critical role in effective task management and delegation.
Andy Gager, chief executive officer at AMG International Consulting, will cover these topics and more in his session “Leadership & Supervision” at NFMT Remix 2024 in Las Vegas from October 29 to 30.
FacilitiesNet: What role does clear communication and follow up play in successful delegation and task management by leaders?
Gager: The No. 1 reason for any improvement initiative or change to fail is a lack of communication. The group that fails to communicate most effectively are our frontline supervisors, and based on my experience I can whittle that down to two reasons.
One, they clearly don't understand what it is that we're trying to do, so their communication to their team is slightly skewed of what the goals and objectives are. Or, more fatal is they don't agree with what the change is, and they don't agree with management. So therefore, they go and they talk to their group and they just say they don't agree with this stuff, but management says we must do it. That's death right there.
I had a boss one time, and he had this thing called the 20, 50 and 90 percent rule. What he would do is assign us a task/project and ask if we were clear on what he was asking us to do. If we said yes, he would then ask us to come back when we thought we were 20 percent into the project.
Then when we think we're 50 percent done with the project or the task, we’d just circle back to make sure again that we're in line and on schedule. Then finally, when you think you're just about done with the project, just circle back one more time.
The second thing is new managers, and I was guilty of this, really struggle with delegating work and authorities because they want to be friends with employees. For me, this was because I was a coworker one day and now all of a sudden, the next day I’m the boss. I wasn't formally trained in how to be a supervisor or manager, so therefore, the way I thought I should supervise was to be friends with my team.
Supervisors and managers cannot be friends with their team. We can be friendly, but we cannot be friends, and that's a very tough lesson for a lot of people. That is because if we hang out on the weekends and things like that, when it comes time to delegate the work, because we're friends I continually give you sweet jobs. That ultimately does not go unnoticed by the rest of the team. Vice versa, if I don't particularly care for you, I'm going to give you all the lousy jobs.
So, delegation is very sensitive and needs to be balanced, the same goes with our task assignment. They can almost go hand in hand. I'm going to assign some of those tasks and delegate some of those tasks to my good employees to give them a sense of contribution. That's also a learning experience or a teachable moment, as we say in the business.
There's a whole lot of things that we can do to communicate because not everybody communicates well. Not everybody's the receiver of that communication either. We're dependent on that receiver to filter our communication the way we are presenting it. That plays a large role as to who are we communicating with and how the receiver is filtering our communication to them as well.
To learn more about effective communication for delegation and getting people in the right positions, be sure to check out Gager’s session at NFMT Remix 2024 this October. Register for Remix here.
Jeff Wardon, Jr., is the assistant editor for the facilities market.
