Welcome to the inaugural edition of Oomph it Up! - a monthly lineup of practice information, advice and resources designed to help you add zest to your professional enterprise. 

Every month, Oomph it Up! will focus on a specific topic professionals tell us they would like to know more about. We'll explore the topic, explain what it is, how it impacts your practice and give you lots of tips and resources for additional help. We'll also interview professionals who have successfully managed the issue and gather industry personalities and experts for lively round table discussions and lunch-hour webcasts you can join right at your desk.  And, we'll provide you with your very own soap box - a monthly poll where you get to tell us how you feel about next month's topic and what areas you would like us to explore.

We hope that you will find our e-zine interesting and really helpful when it comes to adding oomph to your professional life!

Celese & Johanna

Feature story: Delegating Without Losing Control

Delegating is a challenge for all business owners, but it is particularly challenging for professionals who render complex, highly-skilled, and strictly regulated services. Learning how to delegate effectively will enable you to enjoy a more rewarding career experience, grow your practice and establish back-up and succession plans.

Why Delegate?

One person can only do so much. As the principal, you need to focus on the high-value work: the professional service your render and the planning and growing of the practice. With little training in business management however, many professionals don't recognize the importance of financial and strategic planning or the need for ongoing, proactive marketing and spend their time rendering the professional service they trained for and performing the hundreds of menial, time-consuming tasks that keep an office operating smoothly. 

The result is exhausted, stressed out professionals toiling away in practices with limited opportunities for professional satisfaction and growth, insufficient incomes, little or no safety net in the event of an illness, and uncertain retirement prospects.

By learning how to delegate successfully you create an infrastructure where work and decision making are assigned to the right people, with professionals performing work of the highest value and employees performing work of a lower value.

With a solid infrastructure you are able to attract partners and bright, talented staff who are committed and loyal because they are part of a vibrant practice where their talents are appreciated. A strong team has the skills to respond effectively to regulatory changes and can quickly step up marketing activities in the event of changes in service demand, or during economic dislocations, preventing the practice from being mired in perpetual boom and bust cycles.

And, a solid team will provide a bulwark in the event you become ill, want to take time off or are ready to sell and retire. 

Challenges to Delegation

What is it that makes delegating so challenging for professionals? Besides personal reasons or idiosyncrasies, there are several constraints unique to professional practices.

First and foremost are regulatory restrictions. Some are obvious - a paralegal can't defend a client in court.  The challenge lies in the more subtle and difficult-to-define constraints like the directive in the Architects' Act that calls for "principles of responsible control in providing personal supervision and direction for matters concerning the practice". Not meeting standards and losing control is something every professional worries about and why many choose to do all the work themselves.

Lack of business management skills is another culprit. Business and practice management courses aren't part of most professional curricula and there are no instruction manuals that show how to set up workflow and delegation structures in a small professional practice. So professionals are left to learn these skills upon joining an existing practice [often a blind-leading-the-blind situation], or by trial-and-error.

Not wanting to waste time is also high on the list. Practice leaders attempting to delegate often find it takes longer to teach the delegation than to do the work themselves, so they avoid it altogether or give up quickly, not realizing that in the long run, teaching others a routine task will free them up to do work of higher value. Another deterrent is using the wrong technique, which leads to more time spent supervising.

A less recognized, but critical factor, is the inability of professionals to see themselves as separate from their practice - something that most successful practitioners we've interviewed said they learned to overcome in order to move forward. Viewing a practice as a separate entity made it possible to be more objective and determine what the practice needed, enabling them to establish goals and standards and implement procedures.  Above all, it allowed them to share the practice with their employees and clients and to be open to critical assessments from others and from themselves. 

Want to become an expert at delegating without losing control? Click here.

Building a Great Team

Levitt Goodman Architects made a name for themselves with projects that set new standards for social housing and now they are carving an equally noteworthy-path with their environmentally friendly and sustainable designs. Their sensitive and humane approach extends to how they manage their practice. Principal Janna Levitt tells us how they built a great team.

Oomph: You started out in 1989 and today you lead a successful, design-driven firm with a unique management system and culture. How did you do it?

Janna: We've grown slowly but steadily, so we've had time to evolve our systems. From time to time, Dean [Partner Dean Goodman] and I asked my brother [a corporate lawyer] and a friend who's a partner in an engineering firm for advice, but for the most part we evolved our system through trial and error.

There are fourteen of you now. Have you reached thresholds where the system stopped working and you had to change how you run things?

Yes, once there were ten of us it became difficult for Dean and I to juggle all the jobs between the two of us. We needed to delegate more. We also realized that we had people who had been with us ten, twelve years and we saw the need for an environment that would encourage them to stay.

So what did you do?

We revamped the structure. We invited Brock James to become a partner and four other "long-timers" became associates sharing responsibility for management.

 
How does it work on a day-to-day basis? What are your practice and project management structures?

Each partner has practice management duties, deals with regulatory issues and manages projects. Every project has a partner in charge, a project architect who audits the project every month and an architect in charge of internal controls who tracks the process for trends on a quarterly basis. As well, all architects participate in contract budgeting and administration, so everyone understands the impact of their contribution and actions. In addition to ongoing project meetings, the partners meet once a week, the whole office meets once a month and the partners and associates meet once every three months. 

Is size an issue now?

Not really, with fourteen people you are still aware of everything that goes on. And the systems we've created ensure that we can continue to maintain our accident-free record.

How many support and contract staff do you have and which procedures do you outsource?

We don't have any support staff - all of us are architects and we all have specific areas and tasks we are responsible for depending on our level of seniority and skill. We don't "hire and fire" so we're very careful about bringing in contract staff which we do only from time to time. The only procedure we outsource is bookkeeping.  

OK, let's talk about money.

With the systems we've set up to administer contracts and with everyone active in the budgeting process we're very efficient. On the other hand, with three partners and four associates out of fourteen architects, we don't have the profits of a firm with a higher percentage of juniors and support staff. We have chosen quality of practice, quality of design and quality of life over bigger profits. This is how we maintain our creative edge and our ability to produce innovative work on an ongoing basis.

What is different, what is better and what is not-so-great now that you have a formal infrastructure with partners and associates?

Like with everything else, there are advantages and challenges. The best part is not having to work twenty-four hours per day! As well, we now have a very inclusive environment and there's an entrepreneurial spirit in the office; everyone is energized and contributing, which is a joy. It's also a great learning environment: we're very open about our successes and our mistakes, so there are more opportunities to learn from each other.

The difficult part is the trust factor, now that you're not doing everything yourself. When something goes wrong, you instantly second-guess yourself. The irony is that you don't realize that doing everything yourself can be quite dangerous. And, it takes longer to do things. Before, Dean and I made all the decisions, now we have to involve everyone else.

***

Levitt Goodman's work has received numerous awards including a Governor General's Medal of Excellence in Architecture for Strachan House, a Toronto Urban Design Award for The Meeting Place, two DX Design Awards for Eva's Phoenix and TO GO, the Peter J. Marshall Municipal Award of Excellence for Eva's Phoenix, a Silver Georgie Award, Vancouver, for Port Royal Presentation Centre and a Best of Toronto Life 20th Anniversary Award.

Their latest project, Janna and Dean's home, is the first private residence in Toronto with a green roof. It's on the cover of this month's Azure magazine. Click here to read the article.

10 Tips for Delegating Successfully

• Identify the tasks you shouldn't delegate. These include performing your core professional activities; strategic and financial planning and management; important business development activities like initial client meetings and presentations; critical HR activities like performance reviews, discipline and firing.

• Identify the tasks you should delegate. This include most routine project and administrative activities like research and fact-finding assignments; data collection and entry; preparation of rough drafts of reports; photocopying, printing and collating. 

• Identify your reasons for wanting to delegate a task: what are you trying to accomplish and why?

• Weigh the level of risk and the ability of your staff to perform a task and determine the appropriate approach to use - i.e. supervision, management, direction, leading or coaching.  

• Delegate to the right person. Don't always give tasks to the strongest, most experienced or first available person. Recognize that each employee responds differently when assuming different duties and responsibilities.

• Delegate the objective, not the procedure. Outline the desired results, not the methodology. Be sure to delegate the authority along with the responsibility. Don't make people come back to you for too many minor approvals.

• Give clear instructions, explain objectives and set deadlines. Be very explicit - don't assume your staff knows what you mean.

• Trust people to do well and don't look over their shoulders or check up with them along the way. Follow up by asking for progress reports. Set deadlines to track progress.

• Be prepared to trade short term errors for long term results.

• Outsource things that aren't part of your core competency. For small firms, these include accounting, payroll, web site design, hardware and software maintenance.

Resources and Links

Unless you're an accountant, bookkeeping is one task professionals should outsource. It's the best way to ensure that your records are up-to-date and prevent costly mistakes. Billing promptly helps avoid cash-flow gaps and enhances your ability to get paid, since the longer you wait to bill, the higher your chances of not getting paid. It's also the best way to uncover supplier mistakes before it's too late to rectify them. 

• A good bookkeeper is hard to find. Two outstanding companies that specialize in bookkeeping for small professional firms are The Profit Line, "the quick and painless bookkeeping solution" [www.theprofitline.com] and Zoe Klein & Company [office@zoeklein.ca]. Both are professional and practical and take the time to explain financial terms and numbers and how they relate to your business.

For those of you who want a complete reference on how to delegate, the Institute of Leadership and Management's Super Series offers an excellent book.

• Although quite pricey at $100.41 dollars, "Delegating Effectively" covers the subject thoroughly and provides a workbook with exercises. Available at amazon.ca.  The publisher is Pergamon Flexible Learning; 4 edition (Nov 14 2002). The ISBN numbers are 10: 0750658169 and ISBN-13: 978-0750658164.