Delegating in Higher Education





People and organizations don't grow much without delegation and completed staff work because they are confined to the capacities of the boss and reflect both personal strengths and weaknesses.

-- Stephen Covey

A Guide to Effective Delegation for Higher Education

There was a time when delegation was the hot topic of productivity. A smart leader in any organization knows he or she can't do it all.

Yet in higher education, the CIO may be in his or her position because of personal productivity rather than steller managerial skills, and even if the CIO is a great manager, there are circumstances peculiar to higher ed IT that makes the job especially difficult.

The usual tips for delegation apply, I pick these as the top three:

  1. Knowing what, when, and to whom you should delegate.
  2. Clearly communicating the expectations, including the deliverables and due date.
  3. Avoiding the temptation to mettle or take back the work once it is delegated.

I also feel there are three considerations for delegating in higher education:

  1. Qualifications
  2. Loyalty
  3. Accountability

Are They Qualified?

Executives and managers often inherit staff from a by-gone era. In the absence of market-based pay and a strong talent management program, it is safe to assume that your managers and staff are of s mixed skill set and experience.

Managers in particular may have been promoted from technical positions and have little experience in management in spite of great performance as a technician.

Responsibility Versus Skill

Let's first distinguish between responsibility and skill. We define skill as what a person can do while responsibility is what a person actually does.

Skill is required to assume responsibility, but sometimes we have responsibility for things in which we have little or no skill. For example, someone with a background in systems administration may perform poorly when it comes to management.

Manager Versus Technician

If your manager is strong on technical skills but weak in supervision or management, it is unreasonable to think that strategic work will be done to your satisfaction. That's not to say you shouldn't delegate this work -- if the person has the aptitude, they will learn to do the work.

But you should expect some hand holding when delegating this kind of work to a strong technician that is a weak manager.

Leader Versus Manager

Lastly, I encourage executives to understand the difference between a leader and a manager. Does a manager lead? Yes, in a general sense. But I'm referring to visionary work.

In smaller organizations, managers (often called directors) are often pulled between several domains:

  1. The first is that of a supervisor and pertains to activities related to and governed by HR.
  2. Assuming your organization engages in some form of service management, the second is that of a Service Owner.
  3. The third deals with vision. I classify vision as "pre-strategy". It can be hard and not all people have it.

It's hard to be all three, even if one has all three capabilities. More and more, higher education is asking it's middle managers to act more like entrepreneurs.

As with strategic work, leadership work may be delegated to a person with aptitude even if he or she has no experience. Be careful here. Start small. Make sure the person can handle it. Otherwise, the results will be very bad for everyone.

Do They Have Your Back?

The IT executive in higher education deals with politics, business relationship management, and a constant barrage of miscellaneous issues. I can speak vicariously through client experience, that being a higher ed CIO is to often feel alone.

Towing the Company Line

I am alarmed at the number of managers I hear complaining about "how crazy it is around here" or otherwise denigrating the organization and its leadership. These people often complain all directions -- Customers, Users, staff, other managers, and so on. The negative effect of this should not be underestimated.

Being a manager means always rooting for the home team. I didn't mention Salesperson as a role of today's manager, but we might as well acknowledge that a manager must sell initiatives and projects both up and down the chain of command.

An individual with a bad attitude is unlikely to have your back. In fact, the opposite is likely to be true. If you're in this situation, I would encourage to deal with it quickly and decisively.

Communicate the Good and the Bad

Make sure your managers know what's going on at your level. Communicate both the good and the bad. I understand the bad can sometimes be very bad indeed and that you may fear spooking your managers. This is a legitimate concern, but your managers must be people that can handle the truth. If not, get different managers.

They need to understand your perspective. They also need to understand your goals in order to help you reach them.

Allowing Escalation

If you have good attitudes and you are communicating well, then you should create a protocol for escalating things that have been delegated. This shows your managers that you have their back and creates a lifeline should they needed.

Do You Hold Them Accountable?

For managers and staff, accountability is often a word thrown around from time to time, and it is often received like "wait until your father gets home". Before we can talk about remediation, we need to clearly establish how accountability is identified.

The Basis for Accountability

It is unfair to dish out punishment for accountability failures when:

  1. There is no documented expectation.
  2. No authority has been granted to do the job.

These two issues are easily resolved but rarely addressed.

If you engage in service management (and you should), you should have (at a minimum) identified your Service Owners and Process Owners. Often, these are the same people in a smaller institution.

Additionally, a RACI matrix for your Processes is essential for establishing documented expectations. At the very least, you should establish a high-level RACI matrix for your Services so that everyone knows how things are supposed to work.

Real Accountability

Documented Services and Processes and the ownership to manage them both is the basis for real accountability. The organization is responsible for establishing the rules and the employee is responsible for sincere participation in the game.

However, we must take one step more and define the jobs themselves. This is the essence of talent management, and I'm not talking about job descriptions. Talent management is, itself, a collection of Processes, including major phases for

  1. Strategy
  2. Recruitment
  3. Placement
  4. Assessment
  5. Development
  6. Reward
  7. Exit

The content for real accountability is mostly located in Assessment and Development. For a given job, we may define:

  • Credentials
  • (Specific) Duties
  • Experience
  • (Specific) Knowledge
  • Responsibility
  • Roles
  • Skill

As you can see, the organization can set the bar, but the employee must meet the challenge.

In this way, the employee either stives for the prize. Or not. Either way, the organization has a tool that meets the important need of clarity in jobs and job performance -- which includes accountability.

Cascading Force

From the president down to the technician, there is a cascade of accountability that is implied if not documented. We've looked at how qualifications, loyalty and accountability may be identified, but what happens if someone violates the principals we've established.

Accountability means being answerable for outcomes. This is a point upon which, in my opinion, higher education scores poorly. The key metric of any institution of higher learning is student outcomes, yet many organizations rank themselves based on the quality of their faculty, facilities, or amenities.

How many instances can you name in the last year where something bad occurred for which no one was held accountable? Or where a person with little or no control over the situation was held accountable instead?

I imagine there are quite a few instances. Although it has become the status quo at many institutions, any instance of poor accountability is one too many.

This is where the institution's executive leadership must step up and do the right thing. The Cascading Force means that:

  • There is a clear and concise expectation of accountability and consequence based on documented policies and processes.
  • Remediation activities are engaged upon accountability failures.

You must hold your managers accountable, and they, in turn, must hold their staff accountable.

Conclusion

Delegation is not difficult, but it does require forethought and structure. It is generally impossible for us to achieve great things by going it alone. The very nature of an organization is to appropriately distribute work.

I see lots of over-burdened CIOs that are just stuck; mired in operational details that could be delegated to the management team. There is no work-life balance. What we're talking about here is a work-work balance by finding ways to balance the work you should be doing with the work you should be delegating.