Strategic Leadership – Highest & Best Use Part 2: Delegating/Developing

Are you focusing on your highest and best use at work and in your life?  To do so requires a Strategic Perspective.  In my last blog, I focused on the question of “What is your highest and best use?”  In other words, “What is it only you can do that if you don’t do, it won’t get done?”  Answering those two questions sets you up to see your highest value contribution at work or at home in a more strategic framework.  That is the first part.

Secondly, you now need to focus on how you are enlisting others to step up to take on some of the tasks you are now doing that are NOT your highest and best use.  So key questions are: How effectively are you delegating to others?  What are you delegating up to your supervisor?  What are you delegating down and out to those around you?  This means being very clear as to where you can play at your best and offer the greatest value.  To do that, once you have identified it, will require handing things off, delegating out and developing others.  This means “enlisting” others so that they engage in picking up things that are not your highest and best use.

Let me give you an example from personal leadership at home.  Your highest and best use, let’s say in the kitchen, is in cooking wholesome, delicious meals for your family.  One of the things you do a lot that is not your highest and best use is spending time doing dishes and cleaning the kitchen.  Have you enlisted your children and other family members to contribute to cleaning and doing the dishes so you can focus on the cooking, and the other highest and best uses you can make of your time with regard to the family?

A work example would be continuing to do project management and task work that should be handed off to those reporting to you. Doing so will require you coaching and developing them. That, in fact, is your highest and best use as a supervisor.  Yet many managers and supervisors that I meet and with whom I work, have themselves stuck still doing the job that got them promoted to a higher level of authority.

If you continue to do the job for which you were promoted, you set yourself up to sub-optimize – because you are doing the highest and best use for the OLD JOB you had, not the higher level of responsibilities to which you have now been promoted.  That means handing things off and letting others step up and to do that means you now need to spend time coaching and developing others, not doing the old task work you used to do.

How is your delegation?  How effectively are you coaching and working on developing others?  What is your strategic approach to developing talent in others?  What is your primary understanding of coaching for improved performance and growth?  Are you ready to play at your highest level and create even more value in your life, at work and at home?