Dave Stitt > Quotes

“The ones that are greediest and farthest from the bullseye represent the fields of activity that most urgently need to be delegated.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Dweck believes that children’s mindsets are profoundly affected by how we praise them. What should be praised is not just success and signs of intelligence, but the application of the learning process – the effort, perseverance, strategizing, and resulting improvements. This fosters motivation and a sense for how success can be achieved. If we praise only successful results and other signs of intelligence, we may give the child a temporary confidence boost, but we may unwittingly be fostering a fixed mindset. The result is greater fragility, and a dependence on constant validation.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Good delegation requires active participation from the delegator but not overbearing involvement in the delegated thing, which is why, in the beginning, good delegation does not make the delegator’s life easier, necessarily.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Three categories are proposed: Tasks, Processes, and Outcomes. The third category, Outcomes, bestows the most freedom on the delegator and, on the delegatee, the biggest opportunity to grow.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Focussing on progress instead of perfection builds confidence, which boosts our energy, stimulates lateral thinking, and helps us take necessary risks.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“The Specific Test goes like this: Somebody must do something he or she was not doing before. The ‘do’ is a good, ordinary verb that a child will understand. If you are not sure, find a child and ask him if he understands the verb. Doing the thing will have a tangible result, one that we want.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Offering input only when problems arise may cause people to see you as unappreciative or petty,” observe the authors of Giving Effective Feedback (Harvard Business Review Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 2014).”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Spend some time making a list of all the things you do in your role. Work from your formal job description, but make sure to include all the things you actually do, as well, from training new recruits, to organising away days, to setting strategy. Then arrange this catalogue of activities into four groups: Things you are incompetent at doing: The realm of stress and futility, you really should not be doing it. Things you are competent at, but don’t enjoy: You meet minimum standard levels, but others do it better, and it bores you. Things you’re quite good at, but have no passion for: From experience you can do it standing on your head, but it doesn’t fire you up. Things you excel at, and love doing: Here you are ‘in the zone’. It is the realm of Unique Ability, passion and maximum effectiveness. If you think of these four categories as concentric rings, the first is cold and distant, the Outer Ring Of Rank Incompetence, a place to avoid at all costs. Next in is the Ring Of Dreary Competence; you do not want to linger here for long, either. Getting warmer and closer-in is the Ring Of Passionless Skill, where many of us spend more time than we’d like. And in the middle is the Bullseye of Mastery.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Your Unique Ability is the combination of talents, interests and capabilities that is unique to you. How do we recognise it? Four ways: when you are in the zone of your Unique Ability, 1) people admire you because the results are stunning; 2) you love doing it and time flies; 3) it gives you energy rather than sapping it; and 4) you get better at it all the time. Success, insisted Sullivan, comes to people who pay attention to their Unique Ability, define it, and start shedding responsibilities that fall outside it.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“To win back time and unleash talent you have to delegate something substantial. You can tell if the delegated thing is substantial if: 1) it hurts a bit to give up; 2) it feels risky to let go; 3) it is stretching for the delegatee; 4) it makes you all a bit nervous; and 5) it constitutes a good chunk of your time, 20% for example, based on your Time Tracker results (see Chapter 3).”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“This happens when people are allowed to derive three crucial things from work: a sense of autonomy; a sense of mastery; and a sense of purpose.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Three criteria are put forward by O’Neill in assessing trustworthiness: competence, honesty and reliability.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Deep and deliberate delegation moves the focus away from your personal traits as a leader and onto what is more important: the relationships between you and your team.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Without effective goal-setting there can be no holding to account and, therefore, no accountability. If there is no accountability, feedback is meaningless. It will lack purpose and be arbitrary. At worst, it is the mere projection onto an employee of the boss’s own issues. So, deal with goal-setting and accountability first.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Good delegators, it emerges time and time again, are people who instil confidence and belief; who are organised; who communicate well; who let people get on with it; and who provide effective feedback.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“An adversarial approach: assumes the delegatee is shirking, lying, and concealing; probes for inconsistencies in what he says; tests him by using past failures as evidence of future failures; frames the encounter as an argument to be won or lost. A collaborative approach: assumes the delegatee is doing his best with the tools and resources at hand; creates a comfortable space for him to disclose all and reflect on the emerging picture; nurtures confidence in him to promote excitement and buy-in; frames the encounter as productive dialogue to uncover truth, ideas and useful insights.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“• What difficult conversation do you need to have but have been putting off because you don’t want to upset the other person? Idea • An ambitious delegation requires you to give lots of both support and challenge to the delegatee. Idea • Too much challenge is the Zone of Stress, burn-out and uneven results. Too much support is the zone of complacency and slipping standards. Too little of each is the zone of inertia, apathy, isolation and boredom.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“The first is your Zone of Mastery, or Unique Ability, the zone you inhabit when you’re doing what you love most, what only you can do, and where the results are remarkable. However, since this is your work or professional life, you need to apply a second filter, which is the field of activity most necessary to get your organisation heading in the direction it needs to go. Where those two filters overlap, that’s what you should be doing. All accountabilities falling outside those boundaries are ripe for delegation, which will win you time.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“The delegator is able to frame the thing that is to be delegated in a clear way, leaving no room for confusion over what success looks like, or by when the thing should be done.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“The experience led Dweck to develop the idea of two contrasting mindsets that shape our attitudes to our own and others’ abilities. People with a ‘growth mindset’, as she called it, like the positive pupils above, see their intellectual ability as something that can be developed through effort, learning and practice, while people with a ‘fixed mindset’ believe they were born with a certain amount of brains and talent and nothing they can do will change that. Growth mindset people are the more go-getting bunch. Faced with problems, they engage and persevere. Failure isn’t permanent, it’s success not just yet. Using electroencephalograms (EEGs) scientists found more brain activity relating to error adjustments among college students with a growth mindset than among their peers with a fixed mindset.7 Growth-minded people also showed better accuracy after mistakes.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Good delegators: instil confidence and belief; get organised; communicate well; let people get on with it; and provide effective feedback.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Like a coach, the delegator’s job is to raise the delegatee’s level of awareness of the delegatee’s own performance and potential, so that the delegatee can begin to take more responsibility for the factors limiting or enhancing that performance.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Feed back often, good and bad: Get into the habit of providing feedback regularly, so you both get used to it. You are on the same team: Check your feedback style and assumptions. Are you being adversarial or collaborative? Address the method, not the madness: Don’t use feedback to try and fix aspects of his character. That attacks a person’s sense of self-worth. Stick to tactics, knowledge, tips, and work routines. Disrupt patterns of generalities: Vague and evasive language can undermine feedback; learn to spot and challenge it. Offer suggestions instead of criticising: Instead of using the feedback sandwich to sweeten criticism, make a suggestion and offer two reasons why it might work. Everything is feedback: You’re always communicating, so take control and give the feedback you have chosen to give.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“5. Offer suggestions instead of criticising Instead of the feedback sandwich, which can be just a way of sweetening criticism, and tends to do more harm than good, try this deceptively simple technique for giving feedback which was developed by the Canadian Neuro-linguistic Programming trainer, Shelle Rose Charvet, and set out in her aptly titled essay, “The Feedback Sandwich Is Out To Lunch”.14 It goes like this: You make a suggestion. You offer two reasons why it might work. The first states what the suggested course of action would accomplish. The second states what problem it would prevent. You end with an encouraging comment.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Ask the delegatee to summarise the delegation back to you and listen carefully to the words he uses. Are they specific, and is his ‘specific’ the same as yours?”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“Further reading: Challenging Coaching, by John Blakey and Ian Day (Nicholas Brealy Publishing, 2012)”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“If you are disappointed with your candidate’s score because they got zero, but you feel it is not a true reflection, consider broaching the topic with her. You could say, “I’m considering asking for your help on a new project but in the process of thinking about it I realised that I sometimes feel that if I don’t hassle you, things don’t get done. Is that fair?” Make sure you have examples to hand, and ask for her thoughts. Be prepared for a frank conversation, especially if she thinks you may be part of the problem!”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“As a leader your first responsibility is to articulate a vision of where your team or organisation is going. What should the organisation look like, and be doing, in one year, two years, five years? What will we be like, and what will clients be saying about us? Having arrived at the vision, you and your people then need to work out an effective, detailed strategy, a roadmap for getting there.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“To get started there should be no more than five, judged as the most critical for this stage of the project.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time

“True results-oriented people prioritise the cultivation of relationships.”
― Dave Stitt, Deep and deliberate delegation: A new art for unleashing talent and winning back time