2366 -Practical Strategies for Effective Delegation and Engagement with ABC Delegation's Stefan Feuerstein

0:03Stefan Feuerstein:Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free podverified score, free podverified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Stefan Feuerstein:Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Stefan Feuerstein. Stefan, you are the author of the book ABC Delegation. You're a keynote speaker and you're the founder of ABC Delegation. Your website, abcdelegation.com. Well, Stefan, it's great to have you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Before we start talking about your superpowers and start talking about delegation, which is a very popular topic on this show, I always love finding out what high-level leaders do for fun or kind of currently geeking out on outside of work.

1:25Stefan Feuerstein:What have you been into lately?

1:28Josh Elledge:I've been getting really into paddle. It's kind of very common in Spain and Argentina. It's a bit like imagine tennis on a small court that has glass walls around it, and you can play off the ground and off the walls, and you play two-on-two. And it's fast, it's fun, and it's tremendously addictive.

1:46Stefan Feuerstein:it so are you going to so is this kind of like um gosh is it different from i'm not not squash right so when you go to the gym and you see guys just kind of like it i think that's the same thing

1:58Josh Elledge:we're talking about right no no no because squash you're both on the same side like in paddle you actually have a net like a like a tennis court but then you can hit the ball and it bounces and it can bounce off the walls and you can still play it back so it's so it's a lot like tennis with a different racket on a small court and then these glass walls around it so you can kind of bounce the ball off the walls as well to to confuse and and surprise your opponents no kidding so uh

2:24Stefan Feuerstein:compared to um obviously so compared to tennis compared to squash compared to um uh maybe pickleball would be about the size of the court what's that pickleball would be about the size

2:37Josh Elledge:of the court oh got it but then you have glass walls around it like you're in a box and then

2:41Stefan Feuerstein:And what is, so the dynamic, would you explain, how would you describe it is different? Like, why do you prefer that versus the others?

2:51Josh Elledge:It's just because it's smaller and you also have to figure out, like, if the ball's coming towards you and it bounces, you know that it's going to bounce off a wall behind you. You need to figure out which way it's going to come back. If you see that your opponents are too far back, you can hit it hard so that it bounces back and they need to run and try and catch up with the ball. So it's like billiard and tennis and squash all mixed together. It's great fun.

3:14Stefan Feuerstein:Man, that sounds great. That sounds great. Well, awesome. Well, Stephan, let's talk about your work. So the book is ABC Delegation. It's on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback. And so the subtitle is The Manager's Guide to Effective Delegation. And I suspect that there is probably a lot of room for improvement among leaders.

3:39Josh Elledge:Lay it down for us. So when I speak to business managers, often I hear them say, you know, no, I consider myself to be a good manager, but I struggle to delegate. And I would then ask them, you know, what other than delegating, most of managing, I believe, is delegating. So if you think of the best managers you had and also the worst managers you've had, typically it'll be someone who either followed up with you well or someone who micromanaged you and didn't let you kind of suffocate at everything that you were doing, or someone that didn't support you enough in your work, or all these different things that tie back to the delegation practices that the manager has.

4:18Josh Elledge:I love working in a team where I feel like I can grow, where I feel like I have responsibility, where I feel like my work matters. And that's why I developed this framework for delegation called ABC Delegation, so that managers have tools to use with their teams, so that they know how to involve their people, how to divide up the responsibility with their teams in an effective and efficient way. And in a way that really drives engagement and gets people committed and engaged with their work.

4:51Stefan Feuerstein:Well, I know that, do you work primarily with larger organizations? Do you work much with SMBs?

4:59Josh Elledge:With all size organizations, because I mean, anyone who has a team needs to know how to delegate. Anyone, any manager, whether they have 4 ,000 people in jobs I've had in the past, I've had 4 ,000 people working for me, and I've had 250 people working for me, and I've had 12 people working for me. But in regardless of which setting that is, you need to know, okay, how are we going to work together? What is the process through which we work together where I can delegate responsibility to you in a way where I'm not micromanaging, but at the same time where I'm not losing control or alignment of what we're doing as a team.

5:34Josh Elledge:so basically i'd like you to imagine if you're sitting down with your manager and your manager says to you okay well this is the list of the things that i want you to do josh and and anything that i see that i don't like i'll tell you and i'll change it and i'll fix it and i'll i'll move things around whatever or compare that to a conversation with your manager where your manager sits down and says josh this is what we do and they draw a box and they say everything that we do is within this this frame we call it a mission frame there is where we we all of our time, our effort, our resources is going to focus on this.

6:05Josh Elledge:Within that box, this box is yours. So we'll call that your mandate frame. That's your area of responsibility. I will teach you within that box, what things in three categories, what things you can do, do as you want, what things you can do as you want, but you need to inform me. And what kind of things you need to, you need to ask me first. And don't worry, I'll teach you, I'll teach you how those are as we go along. And we can move things from one category to the other as as you prove yourself in the different things. Now, I need you to commit to this responsibility. And in exchange, I will commit make three commitments with you.

6:41Josh Elledge:The first is, I will follow up in a way that actually helps you. The second is I will help you resolve any destructive conflict that comes up either in your team or your team with other with other departments. And the third is a commitment that I will use every piece of work that we do together to build you up as a professional, I will always have that front and center as we're working together, that as we're working together, our work is your training ground for future leadership and for future responsibility.

7:11Stefan Feuerstein:Wow, Stephan, I absolutely love that. To our friends that are listening, I hope you're listening in a podcast app where you have the transcript of that. But I suspect, Stephan, that you document this very well in your book, ABC Delegation. But I just think about how empowering that is. And then certainly, Stefan, I think that there's, you know, kind of that opportunity to kind of follow through with those promises. So can you share any tips for how we can ensure that we haven't delegated more than someone is capable of? Or I think very importantly, that we've aligned expectations appropriately, too, so that, you know, we don't set ourselves up for failure.

7:54Josh Elledge:Absolutely. I mean, delegation is not abdication. Delegation is not go do what you want and we'll see what happens. Delegation of responsibility is I'm giving you this responsibility, but then we're going to stay aligned and we're going to stay connected. And I mean, in the book, I go into the details of these practical tools for each of those commitments. But basically for following up, there's ways to have simple tools, like how do I set up my check-in sessions, my check-in meetings? I call them ABC check-ins. so that it's concise, so that I'm not asking you about things that I don't need to be asking you about, so that you're not kind of feeling like you need to offload some of that responsibility back to me.

8:32Josh Elledge:But using every one of these interactions that we have so that I can teach you, no, in this, do what you want is do what you want. Like, we'll catch that in the evaluations later. But like in the check-ins, you know, I will start with B, you know, don't tell me about A, we'll start with B, we'll move on to C, then we'll look at your mandate frame as overall. I'll focus on something that I like that you've done. And then we'll close and we'll do these very short kind of it's not rude. It's not, you know, it's it's a short meeting where we can we can discuss what really matters and where I need to be involved.

9:05Josh Elledge:Now, I don't know how many times I've been in meetings where I'm sitting there and I'm thinking they don't need me for this. Or in meetings where I've been thinking, how in the world did I not know about this? Or sometimes where it's like, how in the world did this happen without me even knowing about it? And so having these simple tools for follow-up are super important. And the same with the other areas, you know, for the resolving destructive conflict, there are simple tools that managers can use to identify what kind of conflict it is, and then what the steps are to fix it. it's not and all of this is not it's not rocket science it's just it's just collecting the thoughts like like the wisdom that's already out there and putting it into a shareable system like the framework so that when you're talking to your team you can all be talking about the same

9:53Stefan Feuerstein:thing yeah well that's i guess my my kind of my last question here before we talk about uh you know, where folks go from here is I want to be able to inspire a lot of delegation within my organization. So obviously, I want to lead by example. But aside from that, how can I continue to foster that culture of, you know, empowerment and delegation so that, you know, people are staying in their zone of genius? They're not, you know, if I have a, you know, a COO, I don't want them doing a bunch of task management. They should be focused on vision, forward thinking thing, and kind of bigger COO activity.

10:35Stefan Feuerstein:But it's so easy, I think, if we were to do an audit. I suspect that many of us would find that a lot of our managers, directors, leaders of all sorts are probably doing stuff that can be handled by people that are also looking for growth opportunities.

10:53Josh Elledge:Absolutely. And that's what makes managers, I think people underestimate the value of managers, and also they underestimate the cost of managers. If you don't have a manager who is engaging their team well, and engagement levels are the lowest that they've been in a long time, according to the studies that are out there now. If you don't have a manager who's engaging their team well by how they delegate and how they give them responsibility, how they grow them and use the work to grow them for the future, then you're paying them in salary, but you're also paying them in disengagement. You're paying them in higher turnover.

11:22Josh Elledge:You're paying them in absenteeism. You're getting a lot of things that you really, really don't want. so what I found helpful is when you have a framework that you can share and discuss with your team you can also make sure that that scales or that it cascades through the organization I had about years back I had a head of department that was working for me who was amazing with me like he would tell me everything that was going on and everything I needed to know he involved me where I needed to be involved he he was very responsible for his area his mandate frame. And I thought he was doing a great job.

11:58But then I talked to his team, where I saw that

12:01Josh Elledge:there were issues in the team. And we had a conversation. And I realized with them, he was micromanaging. So he was working well upwards, but not working well with his team below him. And then, and so that was causing tremendous stress and performance issues in his team. So when we had, by having a framework that we could discuss, I could say to him, you see this that we do together now i need you to do this with your team and to be able to have like shared language that you can actually discuss with your team how are you doing this part how are you building new leaders how are you resolving the conflicts that you're seeing how are you following up like having these tools to actually tell them like like do this like a lot of a lot of times managers don't don't delegate because they don't know how it's not that they don't want to.

12:50Josh Elledge:It's just that they don't have the tools to do it.

12:55Stefan Feuerstein:Your website, abcdelegation.com, obviously grabbed the book, but you're a good follow on LinkedIn as well. But do you mind maybe just sharing as well a little bit about your services and the next steps where someone might go from here?

13:13Josh Elledge:Absolutely. So we do workshops. We work with organizations or we also run workshops that individuals can go to because we've seen that some organizations, despite it being, in our opinion, obvious that you should invest in your managers, some don't. So if people want to join our workshops, they can do that. They can find those on the website as well or on LinkedIn. But we work with organizations. We work with individuals. I do keynote speeches to bring these ideas to organizations and to associations as well. and we can tailor the work with the teams according to what the organization needs.

13:53Stefan Feuerstein:Awesome. All right. The website, abcdelegation.com. You can get the book from there on Amazon. And again, it's both in paperback and Kindle. Thank you so much for that. I love having a digital version of that. But Stefan, it's a great conversation. Stefan Feuerstein, again, keynote speaker, the author of the book and of course, founder of ABC Delegation. Stefan, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much, Josh. All right. Enjoy your next paddle match. Will do. Thank you.

14:30Stefan Feuerstein:Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue, and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com.

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