DELEGATING: Getting Right People in the Right Seats in Your Business

The inspiration for this post came from Seth Godin in one of his recent posts, entitled “Losing Andrew Carnegie”. Read the whole post here. Seth is reinforcing a principle that he, Andrew Carnegie, Jim Collins, and Gino Wickman believe in – your people are your business.

Seth Godin calls great people Linchpins in his book with the eponymous title. Jim Collins reminds us in Good to Great to “get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus”.

Gino Wickman tells us in Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business that you have to have the right people in the right seats.

By right people, EOS means people who share your core values. Your ability to delegate as a leader is simply the ability to place right people in right seats throughout your organization. See Gino’s entry on May 3, 2010.
By right seats, EOS means that each person is filling a position in your company which 1. they understand, 2. they want and 3. is in a seat for which they have the capacity. Capacity is defined in many ways, – intellect, energy, time, and skills among others. EOS shorthand for this is GWC, – Gets It, Wants it, and has the Capacity for it.

Right seats has another dimension which I’ll talk about in another post – is your company structured in a way to take it to the next level? Have you structured the seats to be filled appropriately?

When you get down to delegating, getting right people into right seats, you will encounter two issues:

1. You have a right person who shares your values in the wrong job or seat. The seat is too big or too small, or

2. You can have a talented person in the right seat who doesn’t share your core values.

Both are detrimental to your company and need to be fixed.

Do you agree? Do you have the tools to identify both issues?