This is part of a 30 posts in 30 days series chronicling my first 30 days in my new role as President of Hanapin Marketing.
I had some great conversations this week around long standing frustrations and my thoughts on how we can be a bit more focused on the highest impact projects. With Hero Pro continuing to develop, more clients and team members than ever and Hero Conf just around the corner we have plenty that needs focused attention!
The downer this week was the perception and/or response to my new found hierarchical power. Instead of speaking freely and then determine who owns what, I found that my words carry more heft.
Further, I realized that I had started to D2NP (delegate to the nearest person, made that up). An example of this is when I asked our Senior Digital Advisor if we had hotel, rental car and a client one-sheet complete for a sales call. We hadn’t got to it yet, no biggie, but instead of me walking 29 feet to the person who could do all this I left it in Kayla’s hands.
In 10 minutes she had the people working on it that needed to be. It got worked out perfectly. And I pushed a 10-minute project on her that she now was an intermediary for taking what I said, trying to say it the same way and picking up some stress because if something goes wrong it is on her now. The nearest person got tasked instead of me talking to the right person.
I understand that I have to work through the team in order to not be a bottleneck. I just hope that the team also pushes back when I D2NP instead of D2RP (delegate to the right person). I also hope that I get better at noticing when I am giving to-dos that aren’t mission critical. There have been a few instances already where I thought I was having a conversation just like I used to and looked at the other person’s notes and realized I had inadvertently given then a handful of tasks.
A few ideas that I may test over the next 60 days:
- Asking, “Is there anything on your list that I can follow up on for you?”
- Reviewing notes after meetings and slashing anything that would just be interesting or helpful so everyone can focus on what is game changing.
- Focusing on one project in meetings so even if a lot of action items come out of it there are centralized around moving one project forward.
- Asking, “What can I do to make it easier to get “x” done?”
- And simply paying better attention to the words that are coming out of my mouth.
If you are interested in reading all posts in this series you can start with post 1 about what I am focusing on as president of a PPC agency. Post 8 is on presenting to the C-Level.
