Delegating To The Floor - For Directs - Part 2 (2026)

Summary

Episode Summary: Career Tools – "Delegating To The Floor – For Directs – Part 2"

Date: September 26, 2014
Hosts: Sarah and Mark
Theme: Practical strategies for individual contributors to gain more time for valuable work by critically evaluating which tasks to keep, streamline, or “delegate to the floor”—and how to get your manager’s buy-in.

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Overview

This episode continues the deep dive into “delegating to the floor”—the process of stopping time-consuming, low-value tasks so you can focus on what truly matters. Aimed at directs (individual contributors), Mark and Sarah explore how to discern essential from expendable work, navigate organizational expectations, and negotiate with your boss for support. Packed with actionable advice and real-world anecdotes, this part (2 of 2) provides a tactical map for anyone feeling overwhelmed by too many tasks.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Building Your Inventory (01:10 – 03:04)

• Start by Listing Everything:
  Mark advises to make “a reasonably accurate list” of all your duties, collected over a couple of weeks to capture both volume and frequency.

  “Don’t do this in one day, folks. Take two weeks, okay? Get a good, healthy sample.” (01:10 – Mark)

• The Hoarders Analogy:
  Begin by “assuming you will delegate everything to the floor”—wipe the slate completely clean and only add tasks back in as needed.

  “You’re going to push everything out... wipe the slate completely clean and assume you’re going to do nothing next.” (02:13 – Mark)

2. Add Back Only What’s Mandatory (03:04 – 05:54)

• Mandatory Tasks:
  Some meetings—like your manager’s team meeting and 1:1s—are non-negotiable.

  “From our example list of above mandatory items would be your manager’s team meeting and your one on one with your manager. Yeah, you can’t not go to those.” (03:04 – Sarah)

• Challenge Assumptions:
  Not every recurring meeting or report is truly required; question your attendance, the need for note-sending, or even if physical refreshments/orders are necessary.

  “Do you really need to be at the Project X Weekly meeting? Right. Do you need to send those notes to your manager?” (03:26 – Mark)
  “Unless you consciously ask the question, you’re just going to assume that you have to be there and you’re going to continue to have no time.” (05:14 – Sarah)

3. Optimize, Systematize, and Automate (06:12 – 10:21)

• Reduce Manual Effort:
  Use templates, automate regular orders, centralize documentation, and let technology (like AI, shared folders) handle admin.

  “Why not have AI keep track of everything and let you know… Should they be posted so everyone who needs access can have it?” (04:18 – Mark)

• Shorten Meetings:
  Question meeting duration/frequency and push for efficiency.

  “I promise you, if that meeting’s an hour long, you can get it done in 45 minutes. You have to facilitate the meeting or somebody does... but it works.” (08:02 – Mark)

• Eliminate Redundant Outputs:
  Is anyone reading those reports or using those binders? Use “Easter eggs” to test if anyone notices changes or omissions.

  “In fact, one of the ways you can tell whether or not something should be delegated is you intentionally miss, and if nobody calls you, that’s a prime candidate for delegating to the floor.” (13:39 – Mark)
  [On Easter eggs:] “He buried a little Easter egg… It was in the HR section of the report. And… only one person noticed—so, pretty clearly, no one’s reading it.” (13:56 – Sarah)

4. Involve Your Boss (15:56 – 19:58)

• Review the List with Your Manager:
  Don’t just stop doing tasks—get explicit approval.

  “We’re not going to skip this step and say… trust us, two thumbs up, you’re going to be fine. We’re not going to do that to you.” (16:17 – Mark)

• Frame the Conversation:
  Don’t present it as dropping your workload, but as analyzing workflow for greater efficiency.

  “Say, ‘I’ve been doing some analysis of my workflow and my workload and I have some ideas and I want to share them with you.’” (17:40 – Mark)

• Adapting to Your Manager’s Style:
  Adjust your message to your boss’s personality (using DISC behavioral profiles).

  “If your boss is a High D… they’re probably going to stop you once you say, ‘I’d like to review some things with you that are no longer required’ and they’re just going to say, yeah, whatever, do that.” (18:08 – Sarah)
  “High C’s… will want to go over the details, who might be affected, what contingencies you have…” (18:50 – Mark)

5. Handling Pushback and Protecting Yourself (20:03 – 27:45)

• Get Manager “Air Cover”:
  When others ask about missing outputs, refer to the decision made in concert with your boss.

  “Your boss is making the decision, even if he or she’s a high D and says, ‘Yeah, do whatever you want,’ your boss is stamping it… so you… have protection.” (22:29 – Mark)

• Customized Responses:
  If you anticipate objections, have persuasive alternatives ready (“the coffee cart is open downstairs,” etc.).

  “Try to make the thing you decided to do instead a benefit to the person who’s asking you if you at all can.” (25:10 – Sarah)

• Be Ready to Pivot:
  Some tasks may need to be picked up again in the future, at your boss’s direction.

  “Tasks might not be forever, and in the same way, not doing them might not be forever either.” (27:31 – Mark)

6. Mindset and Career Growth (27:45 – 29:26)

• Intentional Action:
  The best professionals don’t wait to be told—be proactive in trimming the unnecessary.

  “The truth of it is that a lot of what fills our days isn’t actually required. It’s just what we’ve always done. Nobody told us to stop, so we didn’t stop doing it, and voila, this is the result.” (27:45 – Sarah)

• What CEOs Do:
  This disciplined focus—risking small tasks to win big—mirrors how executives rise in organizations.

  "CEOs got to the top by being wickedly good at this… willing to take risks and delegate things to the floor because they decided they were willing to get in trouble for task number that was priority number 17 so that they could make sure they won on tasks 1, 2, and 3.” (28:36 – Mark)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the “Hoarders” analogy:

  “Wipe the slate completely clean and assume you’re going to do nothing next.”
  (02:13 – Mark)

• On verifying value:

  “One of the ways you can tell whether or not something should be delegated is you intentionally miss, and if nobody calls you, that’s a prime candidate.”
  (13:39 – Mark)

• On bureaucratic binders:

  “Certainly no one fills binders with things anymore… unfortunately, no. It was just like 137 screenshots of Microsoft Outlook calendars bound together.”
  (11:44 – Sarah)

• On self-protection:

  “Your boss is making the decision, even if he or she’s a high D and says, ‘Yeah, do whatever you want,’ your boss is stamping it… so you… have protection.”
  (22:29 – Mark)

• On the CEO mindset:

  “If you win on the big stuff, you can get in a little bit of trouble for losing on the small stuff. That’s how you get ahead in many cases.”
  (28:36 – Mark)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:10 – Building your work/task inventory and the “hoarders” analogy
• 03:04 – What’s truly mandatory? How to decide
• 06:12 – Optimizing processes, automating, and real examples
• 10:21 – Testing if anyone uses/requires outputs (“Easter egg” technique)
• 13:39 – How to identify expendable tasks
• 15:56 – Presenting your findings to your boss and getting buy-in
• 18:08 – Tailoring your message to managerial style
• 20:03 – Navigating pushback and using your boss as air cover
• 27:45 – Mindset shift: proactive pruning for career advancement
• 28:36 – CEO perspective: win on what matters, let go of the rest

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Key Takeaways

• Be ruthless in questioning the necessity of every task you do.
• Get explicit manager support before dropping tasks—never go it alone.
• Leverage technology and process improvements to eliminate busywork.
• Use tact and alternatives to manage coworkers’ objections.
• Proactive task pruning is a hallmark of high performers and future executives.

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In their words:

"Delegating to the floor isn't about doing less. It's about being intentional enough to ask whether every task you own actually needs to be owned by you, or in some cases, not done at all..."
(27:45 – Sarah)

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For anyone feeling overwhelmed by never-ending to-dos, this episode is a pragmatic and encouraging guide to regaining control—and setting yourself up for career-impacting work.

Transcript

[Sarah]

Welcome to Career Tools. This is Sarah and I'm Mark. Today's podcast delegating to the floor for directs Part two of two.

[Mark]

As always, our content has been crafted by humans and is now certified by Proudly Humans. The questions this cast answers are, how do I find more time to do valuable work? What task should I stop doing at work? And the answer is, not everything, folks. And how do I get my boss to agree to me Dropping some tasks to focus. Focus on the right ones if you

[Sarah]

want answers to these questions and more, keep listening.

[Narrator]

Influence without authority is one of the toughest skills in any professional's toolkit, and almost no one teaches it. The Effective Manager conference covers the behavioral tools that builds trust and drives results even when you're not the boss. So you can move forward without the title. To back it up, register individually or bring the conference to your organization. Learn [e-mail] emc

[Mark]

okay, so now we've got a list, a reasonably accurate list. Don't do this in one day, folks. Take two weeks, okay? Get a good, healthy sample. Figure out the volume. You know, something comes up over and over and over again because it takes you three or four hours a week. So if you're doing a random sample, that one will show up more and group them by volume, but also hopefully by the quality or value that they have. And you start by assuming this is important. You're going to delegate everything to the floor, okay? You're not going to keep everything and then pick and choose. You're going to push everything out. The example we use for this is if you've ever seen their sad, really sad TV shows about people who have a mental challenge with hoarding. They hoard things in their house. And so they've got newspapers from 20 years ago, magazines from 50 years ago, and crockery and all kinds of stuff all over the house. Every house is. Every room is almost full of stuff. And in the beginning when therapists would go and visit and try to talk to them, they'd say, hey, what do you think about getting rid of this one thing? The idea we could, one at a time, we could show the limited value and the person would be like, no, that's there for this reason and I really need it, and so on. And then finally the therapist figured out, the only way you can deal with this is to take everything out. Take it all out. By the way, there's two teams that do this. One, they take everything out and there's another team cleaning the house. Because, of course, if you have a Lot of stuff you can't clean between it around it and it becomes almost unlivable. In some cases it actually becomes unlivable like some of you probably feel about the amount of volume of work you have in your job and you take everything out of the house and then you negotiate for what gets to go back in. That's the analogy. Wipe the slate completely clean and assume you're going to do nothing next.

[Sarah]

Then folks, we add back what is mandatory. So from our example list of above mandatory items would be your manager's team meeting and your one on one with your manager. Yeah, you can't not go to those. Those are your manage managers meetings. So those we would consider mandatory.

[Mark]

Yeah. That said, now remember, projects exist underneath the PMO and they all have their own project managers. Are you really required at the Project X Weekly meeting? Okay, could you send a report that was prepared for you by the Project X project manager rather than you going and overseeing XYZ abc? Right. Do you need to send those notes to your manager? No offense, but if you send them to me, I'd be like, okay, great. I guess it proves he did it. If I want information from him or her, I'm going to get it anytime I want.

[Sarah]

I'm not going to go ask and go read that email. I'm going to ask them anyway.

[Mark]

Right. And you might say, well if you'd have read my email and I'd be like, yeah, okay, thanks for that input and you've never done my job, so I'll just tell you it's much easier for me to ask what I want

[Sarah]

when I want instead of reading all your emails.

[Mark]

Hate me if you want, but yeah, do you need to send the notes to your manager? Are they posted somewhere? Right. Why not post them? And in the world of AI guys, why not have AI keep track of everything and let you know and have the distro automatically include your boss or actually ask your boss and she'll tell you, no, I don't want that thing. I know where to go if I need to find Project X or whatever. Should they be posted so that everybody who needs access can have it? Or maybe really the only people that need access to it are the people in the meeting and the other people who want information can ask the people in the meeting and so they have an internal place where they know where it is and you can go find it if you really need it.

[Sarah]

Yeah. So folks, go through all those questions then for the Project X Weekly meeting and follow the same rubric, ask the same Questions for Project Manager or for Project 1? Project kickoff meeting. Exactly. Now, folks, it may well be that you have to be there, but unless you consciously ask the question, you're just going to assume that you have to be there and you're going to continue to have no time. And that's how. That's. I mean, that's the biggest the, the biggest risk. The, the. The reason we fall into this trap is because we accept the meeting invite and we don't ask, is this really a place I need to be? I mean, do you need to order refreshments? Another thing from the list. Could everybody just bring their own refreshments? Could you make a standing order so that you only have to put that order in once and it just keeps coming back over?

[Mark]

And by the way, if somebody complains about that standing order, say, okay, it's your responsibility now. Do whatever you want to do. Otherwise, this is what I'm doing. And you can hate me for the fact that my refreshments aren't that great, but I got better fish, bigger fish to fry them.

[Narrator]

Exactly.

[Sarah]

Than your favorite.

[Mark]

No pun intended. Hey, can I tell a funny story?

[Sarah]

Yeah.

[Mark]

When I was at Procter and Gamble as a former military guy, we used Project X, Project Y, Project Z and so on. But there was a team that was related to mine that had a project, Project Y. And it was one of those bad projects that nothing was getting done and there wasn't any executive support. But people still feel like they needed to go to these meetings and pretend, when in fact it was just getting redder and redder and redder. You might as well just chop the head off and be done with it. Right? And it got to be a joke. It was Project Y, question mark. Like, why? Yes. And it got to be like a sort of a sick, dark joke, you know, like, I'm on Project Y, Project Y. I walked into the meeting not knowing this history, and I said, hey, can you give me an update on Project Yankee? Because that's the military alpha code, alphabetical code Yankee. And they said, what are you talking about? I said, this one here, Project Yankee, it says right here on the agenda, Project Yankee. And they said, no, it says Project Y. And then it connected with me. The why the Project Y and the Project W H Y thing. I said, no, guys, my team, this sales team, absolutely needs this stuff, so we're going to start calling it Yankee. And they're like, okay, we're all right with that. I think they laugh at me behind my back. But we don't call Things Project Y for fear. It's bad and people will go, project Y. Y.

[Sarah]

Exactly. Exactly. Um, and folks, listen, when it comes to these project meetings, it may not be. We can get rid of the meeting altogether. We can make it easier. But how long is the meeting? I mean, does it need to be that long? How often is the meeting? What's the frequency? Can it be done less frequently? Um, just like reexamining the. The agenda for some time savings.

[Mark]

Yeah. And does it need to be that long? I promise you, if that meeting's an hour long, you can get it done in 45 minutes. Now, you have to facilitate the meeting or somebody. You have to teach somebody how to facilitate the meeting and they actually have to push. Okay, enough, right? And you need. People need to learn how to run a meeting. But it works. You can get it done in 45 minutes. Particularly in the world of zoom and teams and slack and all that stuff. By the way, in this example, there's a lot of paperwork moving around in the example list. Are hard copies really required or is the email trail enough? Plenty cases you could create. You could say, if you send out an email about Project Yankee or Project X Ray or Project Zulu, then at the bottom, you should have your status pasted in. In fact, you can paste it in from the project status document that's online, which is updated in real time. Can you compile the project kickoff materials once and then make a template for next time, and then the project manager has to adjust the template to his or her project? Yeah, you could do that. Are you printing materials for people coming to a meeting that have their own access and print their own. Some people don't even like printed materials. They're using a remarkable. Or they're writing on their tablet, on their. On their iPad or on their Surface tablet or whatever. Do project materials need to be shelved? I mean, I don't know if you ever heard it, folks, if you're new in your career, there's a thing. There's a term called shelfware, which is often done by external agencies. Hey, we're going to prepare a big binder for you for stuff. People's bookshelves are filled with binders at the office that no one. You could. You could scrape three years worth of dust off of them. So do we really need to shelve it? And maybe even though there's technically some rules, that it has to be shelved, ask yourself, has anyone ever come down and inspected the shelves to see whether or not it's there? Now, some of you you high seas, you conscientious people, you accountants and software developers. Like, oh, my gosh, it says I have to do it, so I have to do it. But the question is, if you have 140 things to do and you only have 100 time, do it. You're going to have to make choices anywhere. So anyway, so therefore, we're suggesting you make some smarter choices.

[Sarah]

Yeah. You know, Mark, actually, that reminds me of an example from when I worked at university. Folks, if you're not familiar, but prior to my time here at Manager Tools, I worked at the University of Alberta. And you might think to yourself, well, certainly no one fills binders with things anymore. Certainly that's gone the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, no. While I was working there, one of my directs actually came to me. We were. I mean, we were a manager, tool shop. Allah. I ended up here and I T department, so very technically savvy people. I mean, it's not like we were Luddites. It's not like we were people that weren't familiar with computers. And one of my directs came to me with an item that he recommended we delegate to the floor. And I was like, but wait a minute, though. That's the only thing I know you do. He compiled every week. It was called the Labs and Classrooms Report. It was a red binder.

[Mark]

Sure.

[Sarah]

There's actually two. There was a red binder, and then there was this other. Not in a binder, but fastened with a binder clip report of everything going on in the labs and classrooms. And it wasn't until he brought it to my attention, and again, I was like, that's the only thing I really know you do. It seems important, right, that he brought it to me. And I realized it was just like 137 screenshots of Microsoft Outlook calendars bound together.

[Mark]

Oh, my.

[Sarah]

Yeah. And I was like, what are you doing? Why are you. And. And he's. Well, immediately. Of course, he would. As many directs would say, well, that's that. I was taught I had to do that. I mean, this was like a mandatory requirement that I was taught I needed to do. I'm like, okay, yeah, because I'm sure somebody in the 90s invented it before everybody had their own personal computer. And then the report outlived its usefulness. And no one went back and said, hey, this is no longer useful. The person doing it just thought it was mandatory.

[Mark]

And even if he didn't think it was mandatory, do we think people every time will raise their hand and go, what I do has no value. Let's stop doing it. And put themselves at risk. Nuh, no, no, they're not. And you can't blame them for not. Okay? You can't. Just like the old rule, you can't use people's honor against them. I mean, you just. Yeah, that would be wrong.

[Sarah]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mark]

Does project manager Yankee. Does the Yankee project manager really need a status report? Do you really have to do the overall status report? Who reads them? There's a great story in manager tools lore of Mike, when he left mci, went to Bell Atlantic, and there were some people, three or four people in his organization of several hundred people compiling green bar reports, which are the ones that have green and white stripes on them, fed through a belt feed printer. And he asked all the customers that were getting copies of this thing. There were a whole bunch of them in his office stacked up in the corner. He asked all of his customers, hey, do you read this? What way is it valuable to him? None of the people had looked at it at all. Months and months.

[Sarah]

They don't even know what's in it.

[Mark]

He's like, okay. And his people said, well, I'm not going to recommend you get rid of me. I'm not going to get rid of my job. And so you. You could say, okay, well, we'll. There's plenty of other stuff to do. Let's re. Let's work with your boss to repurpose you.

[Sarah]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mark]

What Mike found out was, does anybody notice if it's late or they don't go out? In fact, one of the ways you can tell whether or not something should be delegated is you intentionally miss. And if nobody calls you, that's a prime candidate for delegating to the floor. We're sorry.

[Sarah]

Yeah. And folks, if you're. If the missing. If the risk of missing is unpalatable for you, Bury an Easter egg. That's also a good one. I was once working with. Who was I with? Publicisapien. I was in London, and I remember the gentleman told me a story. There was a report. It had just. It had gotten so big over the course of time. It started as like a one page or it was like 28 pages at some point. And he was like, yeah. And he's. I don't think anybody's reading this. So he buried a little Easter egg, and it was like a joke. Like a joke. And it was in. I want to say it was in the human resource section of the report. And he said something about reinstituting the gallows as A measure to move toward accountability. And it was in the meeting, they were discussing the report in the meeting and one person said, I really like what you put about accountability in the HR section. Right. Because she clearly had read it and was. And noticed his Easter egg. But everyone else was like, very good and acting as if that was a good. I know, I know. So then it was, it was like, pretty clearly like, okay, well no one's reading it, so yeah, bury an Easter egg, write up your entire report and then just take out the second paragraph and send out the one without the second paragraph. And if somebody says, wait, I'm missing a paragraph. Oh shoot. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Here you go. And now you have the actual report. Like these are some measures you can take that aren't just miss but give you that same data.

[Narrator]

We'll say it plainly, the Virtual Effective Manager conference is not a recording. It's not a self paced module. It's a live, facilitated, practice heavy session where you learn one on ones, feedback, coaching and delegation. Virtual does not mean less. It means no travel and no excuses. Register [e-mail] EMC

[Mark]

okay, so that should give you some ideas of how to think, how to approach. Remember, what we're doing is we took everything out and now we're adding back things back in. But our bias is figuring out ways to keep them out to free up our time. Okay, now if you have 24 things to do and you get rid of 22 of them, I would be surprised.

[Sarah]

Me too.

[Mark]

Unless the two are so the two that are left are so huge that you could justify it. It could happen. I think that's unlikely. But a list of 20 and finding 10 that could be not done or delegated to the floor or treated differently or streamlined, that wouldn't surprise any of us here at Manager Tools at all. Next thing on the list, you got to review your list with your boss and this is where you get your defensible position, folks. Okay, we're not going to skip this step and say, okay, you, you did your analysis, now just stop doing stuff and you know, trust us, two thumbs up, you're going to be fine. We're not going to do that to you. So first you could technically just delegate to the floor and see if anybody notices you, you high Ds. As long as you're willing to be singed by some flames, you could probably do that.

[Sarah]

Yep.

[Mark]

And your boss, to be totally fair, may read that as you decided. I'm just not going to do Part of my job. Which is definitely not the message you want to be sending or that we're suggesting you send. What you do is you take your analysis, you go to your boss, you book a meeting, you. So that you have your boss's undivided attention. Now, don't go in and tell him I want to talk about lightning, my workload, because he or she's going to be immediately defensive.

[Sarah]

Yep.

[Mark]

But say, hey, I've been doing some analysis of my workflow and my workload and I have some ideas and I want to share them with you. Yeah, I'd be like, yeah, yeah.

[Sarah]

Oh, absolutely. Some. Some ideas, some ways that we can do more with less. I mean, I don't know a single manager alive that wouldn't be like, yeah, let's do that. That sounds great.

[Mark]

Yeah, let's have somebody else other than me, the manager, think what work is high quality, what work we can delegate to the floor, we can optimize, we can systematize, we can automate, whatever.

[Sarah]

Exactly. Exactly. Now, the folks going back to Mark, mark mentioned high Ds earlier. If your boss is a high D horror or a high I, they're probably going to stop you once you say, I've analyzed my work and I'd like to review some things with you that are no longer required, and they're just going to say, yeah, whatever, do that.

[Mark]

We'll deal with the fires that come up on the exception basis and we'll save all the time for the 90% of the time where nobody freaking notices.

[Sarah]

Yeah, exactly. And our D's, in our eyes, tend to be those profiles, assertive people, folks who are a little bit more comfortable with risk, so they're willing to move a little bit faster and see what happens. And if your boss is one of those, then it shouldn't be too tricky.

[Mark]

Yeah. And what I like to say is if they're not actually shooting at you, there's no risk. Okay. Now, high C's, the conscientious people, the Dr. I's crossed your T's. Logical, linear, factual, rational folks, they'll want to go over the details, who might be affected, what contingencies you have. And maybe you don't have those contingencies perfectly worked out. And maybe he or she can help you. High S's, the steadiness people, the warm, the den mothers and den fathers who everybody likes and they know how everybody's feeling and so on, are going to be concerned that you're overworked and that's why you're dropping Some things. Okay, so it might be worth it if you don't know about it. Work out what your boss's disc profile is. And by the way, if you take our disc survey, you'll the empty disk. You'll find out what you are and that will give you a good sense and it will teach you enough about disk that you can probably peg where your boss is and that will help you determine your approach to her and how it might be the same depending or different depending upon whether they like you or whether they're like you or not.

[Sarah]

Yeah, it'll help you be more persuasive.

[Mark]

Yeah. Be prepared so you can be persuasive depending upon your target audience.

[Sarah]

Exactly. Exactly. Now folks, that takes us to then the last piece of our guidance, the dealing with pushback piece. So once you've got permission from your boss, that's when we would recommend you start dropping the things that you've agreed with your boss, won't be done and moving the other things off your plate. If you do get pushback from an individual. Hey, I didn't get that report. Where's that report? For example? You can refer that person to your boss or you can handle it yourself.

[Mark]

Yeah, but here's an important thing. At the top of the show, guys, we talked about how this, how delegating to the floor fits into this larger organizational system of pushing work down. This is a key part of delegating to the floor that doesn't exist at any of the other levels because you have increased risk. Individual contributors. I actually don't like it. I don't like when people say ICs. They call them ICs because there's a lot less syllables, abbreviation. And I just, and I just think, guys, some of you are going to laugh at me and a couple of you will write me emails if you like. It's market manager-tools.com go ahead right away. Okay. But I find it interesting that the single most populous job in the company is individual contributor. A lot of different titles, right? Programmer, logistics coordinator, whatever. But they're individual contributors and every other title gets a name. Manager, senior Manager, Director, Senior Director. We don't call managers M's, we don't call senior managers SMS. God forbid. We don't call them directors high DDs. We don't call them senior directors. We don't call them SDS. We do call VPs, VPs or EVPs and CEO. But to call an individual contributor an IC. I think for the vast majority of people they interact with that have names, I Just don't. I don't like it, but I know people do it. I don't do it. I like to say individual contributors, but here's the lesson, guys. Everyone in the company either is at your rank. And there are some subtleties in individual contributors. There's some that are more special. There are certainly some individual contributors who are fellows and, and seriously technical geniuses. And, you know, okay, they, they don't technically outrank you, but they're a lot more powerful than you. Right, because of their reputation. But everyone else in the company is either at your level or above your level. Okay? So you have elevated risk in this process of the delegation cascade as your boss gets something from her boss and then delegates something to you. So the reason you do your own analysis, because you're the person to do your analysis, not your boss. If you're a manager now and you're thinking, I'll do the analysis for each of my people, you're insane. Stop it. Okay, that you, you will never be able to do a good time survey on somebody else unless you take a month off your job and just follow that person around. So the individual who does the job knows the job. So they have to do the analysis. They have to make the recommendation. But if we didn't make it clear before, let's be clear now. Your boss is making decision, even if he or she's a high D and says, yeah, do whatever you want, your boss is stamping it. So when Sarah, my peer, comes to me and says, hey, where are we on this Project X reporting thing? I'm going to say, hey, I'm sorry, my boss, Joe, we're not doing that anymore. And so now Sarah, if she wants satisfaction, she has to go to Joe. She's got to go to a higher level. Guess what? Sarah's not going to do that.

[Sarah]

She has less influence.

[Mark]

Not going to do that. Yeah. Now if Sarah's peer, Mike, comes down to me and says, hey, Horseman, where's my stuff? Where's the report on Project X Or whatever, Say, hey, I'm sorry, Mike, I, you know, I get it, I understand. I'm going to be much, I shouldn't say much more respectful to Mike, but I'm going to talk like he's a manager and it's slightly different to my individual contributor peer. And I'm going to say, would you go talk to my boss? Because we had a conversation about this and she made the decision. And we know there's some risk and some downside, but we think we can tolerate It. So it wasn't my decision. Right Now, Sarah's right. You can choose to do it yourself. But if you make the decision yourself and you haven't briefed your boss, you don't have that little bit of air cover that the system allows you to have. If you're a director in the middle of the organization and you decide to drop some things, delegate some things to the floor, your boss is not responsible for that. Actually, technically the bigger picture, he is. But if somebody goes to your boss and said, did you know Horseman isn't doing X? He'd be like, no. And if he's a really good boss, you say, but if Horseman's not doing it, I trust him. He shouldn't be doing it. And then that other person is going to have to convince my boss to come down and tell me I have to start doing it again. But at the individual contributor level, the system allows for you to get a blessing from your boss so that you, as the least ranking person in an organization, who therefore has the most risk on decisions like this, you have protection. It's one of my favorite parts of delegating the floor.

[Sarah]

Yeah. So if you do decide, you're not going to send the individual to your boss. And for example, let's say you decide not to order refreshments for the Project Y meeting, you can just simply say, you know, I decided it was more important that I got the recording document set up so that we could start that straight away. And the coffee cart on the fifth floor is open. So if you want to grab something. Right. Something like that. Right. Try to make the thing you decided to do instead a benefit to the person who's asking you if you at all can. And you know, sometimes you're going to be able to work it out in advance. Oh, I know who's going to have a problem with this. And going back to our conversations about this. Yeah. So again, going back to our conversations about disk, think about that person, plan in advance. What are they probably gonna dislike that you stop doing? Be ready with something that is a persuasive response to that because oftentimes like, oh, oh, we can do this instead. Okay, yeah, never mind.

[Narrator]

Right.

[Sarah]

I'll get a coffee.

[Mark]

Now, if you're, if you're standard, when you try to think of a persuasive thing like, hey, the coffee cart's available on the fifth floor. You could stop by there for the meeting or whatever. If somebody, you say that to them, they say, huh, not sure I like that. But they walk away you just won. Don't sit around trembling in your boots like, oh, my gosh, he's mad. She's mad. They came to you to get you to do something. You gave them a legitimate alternative. That is a reduction in workload for the organization, freeing you up to do more important things. They realize they lost. They don't like it. Nobody likes to lose. But they walk away. Don't overanalyze it and go, oh, my God, I'm ruining my career. The thing that you're winning is time to work on those special projects or freeing yourself up to finally have the bandwidth to consider being promoted by your boss and so on. So that's a win, even if they grumble. Yeah, yeah. But something bigger, like not doing reports again, might need to be referred to your boss, which is why you would brief her if you chose to brief her, and we recommend you do, be prepared to be told by your boss to pick something up again that you have taken out of the house. Hoarding and you've recommended gets delegated to the floor. Tasks might not be forever, and in the same way, not doing them might not be forever either. Okay. It could happen. Hopefully the time in between has given you a chance to get more efficient with the more important things on your list.

[Sarah]

Exactly. All right, so I'm going to wrap it up for us today, folks. Most of us are busy, but busy doing what? The truth of it is that a lot of what fills our days isn't actually required. It's just what we've always done. Nobody told us to stop, so we didn't stop doing it, and voila, this is the result. The best professionals don't wait to be told what to drop. They analyze their own work and they make smart decisions about what actually needs to be done. Delegating to the floor isn't about doing less. It's about being intentional enough to ask whether every task you own actually needs to be owned by you, or in some cases, not done at all. The ones that don't are stealing time from the work that actually moves one's career forward.

[Mark]

And I will tell you something. If you're wondering about this at an individual contributor level, I'll just add this. This is exactly how CEOs think. If you think you have a shot, if you're a young person and you're excited about your career and you think, you know, I might want to be a CEO someday, well, good, Good. A little bit of ambition is good. It's good to be humble, too. But let me tell you, CEOs got to the top by being wickedly good at this. They were willing to take risks and delegate things to the floor because they decided they were willing to get in trouble for task number that was priority number 17 so that they could make sure they won on tasks 1, 2, and 3, which are the priorities. Right? That's the big stuff. If you win on the big stuff, you can get in a little bit of trouble for losing on the small stuff. That's how you get ahead in many cases.

[Sarah]

Thanks folks. We hope this one helped you. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only.

[Mark]

Five stars only. Please.