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Delegation in practice

Not too long ago, as I was sitting at my desk working – it was so late that it was actually the regular work day for my team in Asia. This was common. I was working so many hours, that I was working during two shifts (US and Asia). My frustration was rising with the project and with my team. However, the team was bewildered by my reaction. They were doing everything I assigned to them – why would I be upset with that?

Why indeed. I had fallen into a common trap. I thought I was delegating, but instead, I was simply assigning tasks and retaining ownership of everything. It was during one of these marathon work sessions that I realized I needed to make big changes – and fast. I began to look at when projects worked, seemingly without my intervention and when they didn’t. Breaking it down, the solution jumped out clearly. There are five steps to successful delegation.

1. First, you must clearly define the task. What is it that needs to happen? What is your desired result?

2. Second, select the team or the individual that you want to accomplish this result.

3. Third, tell the individual what’s being delegated to them. It’s also important to let other people in the organization know that this person is now responsible for the task, so they know not to keep coming to you about it.

4. Fourth, keep in place a monitoring system, so you can ensure that progress is being made and they’re not getting off-track.

5. And finally, complete a final review. Look for lessons learned and how things can be improved in the future.

These five steps are logical enough – the key is putting them into practice. I started with the project that caused the most work hours for me. I looked at my Asia team to determine who had the ability to lead the team on-site, then, before assigning the team member the task, I set clear objectives and goals. Successful delegation requires a clear end result.

I selected Helen for the role. She had the skills necessary as well a willingness to take on more responsibilities. After I determined the right person, I knew I had to give her the authority she needed to meet her objective. This is an important point since you can’t expect success without a willingness to give up some authority. You also can’t just delegate it and walk away. You may need to teach new skills and also ensure that the rest of the team understands this shift in ownership.

After you’ve truly delegated, you need to monitor the progress. Look at the plan. Make sure that there’s some scheduled goals and meetings to ensure that the tasks are being met. I usually do this with in 1:1 meeting. This is a schedule time for us to talk about anything that may be of concern as well as upcoming due dates and milestones. These informal discussions can provide an excellent framework for feedback. If necessary, provide some direction. Give your team the objectives and the clear goals to keep them on track. Provide encouragement. You want to boost morale and make sure that people are making progress going forward. A good way to do this is by monitoring with milestones. A subtle but effective form of monitoring is using these milestones.

Often, it helps to create a series of small, interim deliverables that will serve as checks-and-balances on the progress of a larger task. These milestones can then be used as a basis for progress reports (1:1 sessions).

What happens when you do have problems? You need to learn to manage by exception. When it comes to delegating, you need to keep it organized. Make sure you know where they are and that they know and can track their milestones. In my case, when Helen started slipping on a key deliverable, we worked closely together until she was back on track. It was difficult for me, personally, because I just wanted to fix it. In the short term, it would have been much faster to simply fix it and hand it back. However, I wanted Helen to retain authority over the Asia team – this required her to find the solution and implement it. How?

The key is developing a structure. If the people you’re delegating to are having trouble, help them, train them. Make sure that they understand that if they run into a problem, they can contact you. This extra effort should be short term and the long term benefits are many. They include not only the deliverable at risk, but the entire delegated ownership and who knows – maybe bigger and better projects in the future. With Helen, that was the case. She overcame the short term concern and the project went on to deliver on time. Even better, I was back to just working the US shift!

Performance and deliverables are, ultimately, in your control. Are you ready to make it happen? Go to http://www.delegatesuccess.com and take the readiness quiz.

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Filed under: Management

Lead generation is a marketing term that refers to the creation or generation of prospective consumer interest or inquiry into a business’ products or services. Lead Generation is not a new form of gaining new business, but it now has a new approach. Lead generation is a win-win for both the buyer and seller.

Companies will become more select on who can market their clients to ensure that converting leads are gathered and sent on. Companies that can perform and provide quality leads to their clients will be sought out by previous clients of companies that couldn’t perform. Companies-usually relocation departments-receive lead information, which is then passed on to associates.

Sales lead generation has never been this simple. Sales lead generation is implemented through three processes. Sales Leads Now is the initial purpose of search engine marketing.Online AdvertisingOnline advertising has significantly transformed since the eruption of Web 2. Online lead generation strategies enable education marketers to:Quickly build a high volume of targeted leads that have proactively expressed an interest in their programs.

Lead Acquisition is one of the most critical activities within the lead generation process. Lead generation could work for just about any business, but most industries using this type of marketing include insurance agencies, education institutions, office suppliers, and furniture stores. Lead generation has become popular with businesses because it enablesa business to determine pricing on a per lead basis. Lead generation will continue to grow and businesses will continue to perfect the model.

Consumers are constantly warned against giving personal information to companies. When the most popular websites in the world make money from selling advertising then you have to believe there is a massive need for companies to market themselves in a traceable, affordable way.If one of the visitors opt in to the ad, they send the information so you can immediately start building a new database.For complex products and services requiring a complex decision process, the keys are identifying the most likely prospects and then educating and qualifying them before deploying more expensive sales resources.The goal of lead generation is the creation of more selling opportunities. Yet, for most organizations, lead generation is a hit-or-miss affair.

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Filed under: Marketing

Power can be defined as the ability to shape and alter the course of events. It is both a necessary, and perhaps the most distrusted component exigent to human progress. While power is often misused, it remains an essential part of implementation. If an organization is to see its goals achieved, it must find leaders who understand how to wield power and act appropriately.

There are many types of leaders and there are also many types of leadership training available. Leadership competence coaching works with the proposed leader to make them more aware of their surroundings, having them adjust to different situations while commanding and shaping underlings. There are three main types of leaders; Commanding leaders pass out assignments and reward or punish based on performance. Shaping leaders use networking and organizational goals while persuading leaders use knowledge, compromise, input, and teamwork to achieve results.

Business leaders can become exceptionally skilled negotiators with leader competence coaching. In organizations, good negotiating is a very important skill to possess. Leaders must also implement the right approach to negotiation. The objective should be to reach agreements that satisfy all persons involved and are equally fair to everybody.

In business, any good leader must function as an executive coach for his or her subordinates and team members, and communication skills are vital to this task. Although written communication is the key to the official, formal aspects of business, most people respond more readily to verbal communication when going about their daily routines.

Listening is the most important communication skill. One who hopes to direct others must first listen to them. Leadership competence coaches understand this need, and will encourage many forms of communication in the organization they are coaching. One way of listening that is commonly taught is to repeat the other person’s words to be sure that you are hearing what they are saying. The first speaker must approve what you say you have heard before you are allowed to respond with your own ideas.

A good business leader always leads by action. He should do what he expects out of others. He should act like a role model. He should be able to solve problems efficiently, plan the things appropriately and able to bring about required transformations with ease. To acquire all these qualities it is mandatory to take leadership competence coaching. This coaching is really helpful to make you a competent leader.

Power requires the ability to influence people and affect the course of future events. There are many types of leaders and there are also many types of leadership training available. If you are a business leader who wants to increase your negotiation skills, leadership competence coaching may help. Because all leaders need to play the role of executive coach for their employees and/or teammates, they must have excellent communication skills. The leader needs to walks his talk. He should be an administrator, problem solver, planner, strategist and transformer. This type of coaching teaches the leader to be all that and even much more than that.

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Filed under: Business

One of the stumbling blocks that internet marketers run into is the lack of traffic to their sites. How then do you get a steady flow of good traffic to your business site and grow without the know how of big name marketers? You use the simplest method available, one that many people overlook. Traffic Exchanges!

What do traffic exchanges do and what are they?

Traffic Exchanges as they are called bring a huge service that can cost thousands a month driving traffic to a business for only a small amount of time spent surfing other advertising sites. Traffic Exchanges should be used in every business to boost sales.

Traffic Exchanges – How do they work?

Traffic Exchanges use a vote based system where a viewer views a site for say 15 seconds and then has the to click a verification link or number in order to receive credit for viewing that site which means you have around 15 seconds per person that will be taking a hard look at your business. This can lead to massive sells.

Traffic Swarm is by far the best traffic exchange out on the net, with over 400,000 active members your site is guaranteed to be viewed by people who are very interested in what you have to offer. There is a secret to traffic swarm, please read below for this little known tactic that will boost your sells starting today!

The Many Secrets of Traffic Swarm

When you purchase or surf more than 8K credits you will pass a secret point in traffic swarm and boost your site to the top ranks within the traffic swarm system. That being said, you will no doubt excel to the highest level and have your site viewed above everyone elses. What does this mean for you? This means your traffic will surge 300% to an extremely high level thereby sending tons of leads, traffic, and potential sells to your business.

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Filed under: Advertising

Howdy Fellow Business People,

I’m pretty good at getting repeat copywriting business. But I found out it’s not that way for everyone. David Garfinkel knew, so he invited me to I speak on his teleseminar called “Repeat Customer Profit Bonanza!”

I guess it was “unconcious competence, because I didn’t have a clue why I got so much.

So I dove into the bowels of my mind (ok… maybe that’s not a good visual…) and I tore the whole process apart. Took a long time, but in the end, I liked the formula.

Wanna know my secret?

Okay, since you asked here’s what I came up with.

It’s such an easy formula, master it and the rewards are golden.

1- Results.

But hang on, that’s not all of the formula!

The second thing you need to nail is COMMUNICATION.

2- Communication.

When you communicate, you build your relationships, find new needs and show new solutions that your customers don’t know you even offer! It works online or offline, keep the communication flowing and make sure you aren’t always pitching in every communication.

After that, you need to deliver a heaping dose of VALUE.

3- Value.

Make sure your customers know you have other competencies and give them value along them.

Just share your unique knowledge… add more value… and they will see how different you are compared to the competition. (You’ll smoke the competition!)

For example, my copywriting clients end up getting thousands of dollars of marketing advice for free. .

Don’t be one of those people who only do what they need to do to get by… get outside of that mindset.

Customer service on the web sucks. At least most of it does. Why not go one further and provide warm fuzzy customer care? You’ll instantly be different than everyone else… and your customers will LOVE you for it.

Why not be different from all the cold prickly “service” people are used to? Think that will set you apart?

Just some warm fuzzy customer care will set you apart. And your customers will notice… and your trust skyrockets.

For example, I work with Rick Raddatz, HE gets it. I was flown by Rick to Brekinridge Colorado for a 2 day brainstorming session this winter. We focused on customer service a good amount of the time.

But Rick didn’t just pay lip service to the concept. When I wrote his Instant Teleseminar copy, we added Ricks personal cell phone number in the copy.

Because they took the time to set it up (which most people do half heartedly) and now that expense has actually paid off.

Don’t be afraid to invest in customer care… it pays for itself.

Which would you rather have?

The upside is, it helps with your customer COMMUNICATION and you’ll get new ideas for products and services.

Bottom line – Not only did customers have Rick’s cell phone number as a “security blanket” that made them feel cared for, but Rick saw other benefits too. Talk about a win-win!

(A pro copywriter like me shudders at one and done business models…)

Put the formula to the task and watch your business explode.

Cheers,

Million Dollar Mike

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Filed under: Internet Marketing