One of the ways that an employee delegates a task back to you is by bringing you a problem and asking you to solve it. They ask, “Can you take care of this task for me, or get me this information?” Since you are the boss, and obviously more competent and knowledgeable than they are, you agree to take care of that for them and get it back to them as quickly as possible. But then something else comes up, and it goes onto your stack and gets buried among your other responsibilities.
The Monkey is Now on Your Back
Here is the rule: the person who has the responsibility for the next step in the job is the one who is responsible. When your staff member asks you to do something, the doing of which determines them doing their job, they have delegated the task back to you. The monkey is now on your back. Soon, your staff member will be coming by to supervise you and to ask you how things are going. You will now be working for the person who was working for you. You will be promising and assuring them that you will get their job done and back to them as quickly as possible.
299
Time Power
The way to resist reverse delegation is to refuse to take the task back, once you have assigned it. When they ask you to do something, you instead ask,
“What do you think we should do?” Whatever they suggest, you can comment upon or agree, but whatever it is, you pass it back to them so they can get on with their job.
Resist Your Natural Tendencies
The natural tendency in working is to go from managing back to operating.
Since you go to where you are today by doing a good job on your way up, whenever you find yourself under pressure, your natural tendency is to go back to doing what you were doing before that got you to where you are today. You must fight this tendency or you will soon find yourself at the bottom of the food chain, being delegated to by the different members of your staff.
The definition of a good manager is a person who “gets things done through others.” Your job is to make sure that other people do the job correctly, rather than going back and doing it yourself. Push on to others everything that can possibly be done by them. Once you have delegated and assigned a task, don’t take it back.
Teach and Train Others
Take the time to train and to teach your subordinates and others how to do their job. The more you train them, the more you build their confidence so that you can delegate even more tasks to them. Teaching other people how 300
Time Power
to do a job gives you a high “return on energy.” Once you have taught someone how to do a part of your work, you can always delegate and free yourself up for other work that pays you a higher hourly rate.
Focus on Clarity
The major problem and time waster in communication, and working with others, is fuzzy understanding. The antidote to fuzzy understanding, one of the greatest time management tools of all, is clarity. Clarity is only achieved through repetition, discussion, feedback and agreement. Take the time to learn how to be a good communicator. This will pay off in tremendous time savings and will increase your effectiveness in every area of your life and work.
“Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself.
Before you can move their tears, your own must flow. To convince them, you must yourself believe.” (Winston Churchill)
Action Exercises:
1. Practice delegating everything to anyone who can do the job at a lower hourly rate than you desire to earn.
2. Be crystal clear in explaining to others exactly what is to be done, and to what standard of performance, and by what date.
3. Sit down with each staff member and explain to them exactly why they are on the payroll, and what their highest value tasks are.
301
Time Power
4. Keep everyone “in the know.” Be sure that your staff is aware of everything that is going on that affects their jobs in any way.
5. Whenever you assign a task, ask the person to feed back to you what you have said; this clears up a lot of misunderstandings.
6. Practice participative management with your staff; hold weekly staff meetings and invite everyone to participate and ask questions.
7. Remember that your people are your most valuable asset; continually seek ways to communicate with them more clearly.
Chapter Eleven
Time Management for Sales People
“The successful person makes a habit of doing what the unsuccessful person doesn’t like to do. The successful person doesn’t like to do them either, but he does because he recognizes that this is the price of success.” (Herbert Gray)
In 1928, the magazine Sales and Marketing Management surveyed American businesses to determine how efficiently sales people were using their time. They discovered that the average sales person in America was only working 20% of the time, approximately one and one half hours per day.
302
Time Power
This finding caused alarm bells to go off throughout the sales industry. The idea that sales people were only working 90 minutes per day became the emphasis for improved training, better time management skills, better supervision, and better control of the activities of sales people. It led to a greater focus on the accountability of sales people to the company for the way they were spending their time.
In 1988, sales and marketing management magazine reported on the results of this training over the past 60 years, aimed at upgrading the time efficiency of sales people. They reported that, in 1988, the average sales person in America was still working 20% of the time, 90 minutes per day. Nothing had changed.
A study at Columbia University came to the same conclusions. After interviewing thousands of sales people, they found that the first sales call of the day was made, on average, at approximately 11 am. The last sales call of the day was made on average, at about 3:30 pm. The rest of the time of sales people was spent preparing, shuffling papers, traveling, eating lunch, drinking coffee and complaining about how tough the business was.
McGraw Hill did a follow up study in the 90’s and reached the conclusion that sales people were spending 37% of their time selling. This report turned out to be based on what is called “self reports.” This is when the individual salesperson reports, according to his personal recollection, without notes or records, a particular number. Alas, we can safely conclude that the average sales person only works 90 minutes a day.
303
Time Power
Double Your Sales
In my sales programs, I teach what I call my “minutes theory.” It is based on a simple equation. If you are in sales today, 100% of your sales and your income today are generated by the number of minutes that you spend face to face with prospects and customers. If you want to increase the number of sales or the amount of money you make, you must increase the number of minutes that you spend in actual selling activity, face to face with people who can and will buy from you.
My theory says that if you double the number of minutes that you spend face to face with customers, you will double your income, even if you do not improve in any other area of sales. If you manage your time, as the top salespeople do, so that you are spending more time with customers, your sales will increase immediately.
If you are in sales and reading this chapter, in the next few pages, you are going to learn how to double your time effectiveness and double your sales.
Thousands of sales people are already using the ideas in this chapter to double, triple, and even quadruple their income in as little as six months.
Many of my graduates have doubled and tripled their sales in less than a month as the direct result of applying these methods and techniques.
The Job of the Salesperson
304
Time Power
Let us begin with the job description of the sales person. The job description of the sales person is to create and keep customers. The measure of effectiveness of a sales person is how many new customers he creates, or resales he generates, in any given time period.
Everything else that a sales person does is secondary to creating and keeping customers. Therefore, the only time a salesperson is working is when he or she is face-to-face, head to head, and knee to knee with a prospector or customer.
Sales people are the only working people in America who wake up each morning unemployed. And they remain unemployed until they get in front of a person who is capable of making a buying decision. The first rule for sales success can be summarized in six words, “Spend more time with better prospects.”