How to stop making excuses and start making time
It’s a lonely place, being the leader of a small charity or social enterprise – especially if you set it up yourself. You find yourself being CEO, chief marketeer, mentor, finance officer, office manager, IT support, head of evaluation… if not window cleaner and tea maker as well!
Maybe this functions okay when the organisation has only a few employees, but as your services, staff and income grow you will need a more efficient structure that makes use of everyone in the organisation.
Sounds great – but we are often very resistant to letting work go! Below are real examples of some of the reasons overworked charity leaders have given me for not delegating to staff and trustees.
I don’t have enough people to delegate to.
Of course, this is the number one problem. How can you get things off your plate if there aren’t enough others to put them on?
Every charity I see is stretched. But this is about respecting the value of your own time too – after all, you are the leader! Have a frank conversation with your staff to discuss how to move tasks around.
A helpful exercise in delegation is to draw up an ‘Activity Map’ outlining the different areas of your work and an approximate of how much time you spend on each. It may be useful to use headings such as finance, practice, staff, admin, governance, and strategy. List everything you do underneath these headings and then re-visit – what is priority for you, and what is on the list which you should not be doing as leader of the organisation? Maybe some things need to be de-prioritised – but this doesn’t just have to be your tasks. Be creative.
My staff don’t have the skills and I end up having to fix the mess.
Whenever this comment appears in meetings with charities and Pilotlighters, the question fired back is always: “How do you know?” Usually, a charity leader has tried delegating important tasks, finding mistakes have been made and then taking them back under their own remit.
There are two things to remember here. Firstly, it is possible your staff won’t do 100% as amazing a job as you: you’re a perfectionist and you know the organisation inside out. You must develop a threshold for tolerance here. What are the tasks that can be 80% great?
Secondly, everyone makes mistakes! By removing someone’s responsibilities the moment they put a foot wrong, not only are you giving yourself more work but also damaging that person’s confidence. Discuss what needs to be improved and what support they need. Your employee will become more and more capable – and you might discover skills you didn’t know they had.
Trustees are only volunteers – I can’t ask much of them.
Yes, they are volunteers. But they have also made a commitment to the organisation. Generally, trustees want to contribute effectively to the charity, otherwise they wouldn’t have signed up. The key is to find each person’s skill set and engage them in activity where they know they can make a difference. Creating sub-committees of this kind can be an effective way to re-engage and motivate trustees to supporting the CEO and charity more strongly.
It requires careful communication: revise induction processes to make clear that you expect more time between meetings to support in relevant areas and, if necessary, re-induct existing trustees with the rationale that your organisation is growing and needs to become more professional.
It is right to know the boundaries a trustee board must have, but be demanding too!
I try and delegate, but I don’t have time!
All of the things needed for effective delegation require two key elements:
- Planning. This is the time-consuming bit. Find the time to put processes in place. Design operating models to make clear which responsibilities are whose. Communicate changes to staff and trustees to really embed them. This should save time in the long run, but it depends on…
- Discipline. If someone skips their line manager to bring a problem to your desk, insist that they follow the hierarchy. When you see someone going astray, give a guiding hand rather than taking it back. Have clear times when you check progress against a set of indicators so you have the right level of oversight. Follow your own processes!
Get this right and you will find you have more time so you can deal properly with those crises or opportunities that do require your attention – not to mention rediscover your work/life balance. Leading is not about working 24/7!