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As you grow in attaining positions of importance in life, you’ll often have to make decisions on whether to do work yourself or allow others to try.
As someone who seeks order and control, this decision will be a difficult one to make. By assigning ownership to others, you lose a certain level of control over the outcome. You place trust on the person charged with completing the task in question, and will have to check their output to ensure that it meets your standards.
There will be people who let you down with the work that they do. Your strive toward perfection can differ from that of the ones around you, thereby resulting in differences of what you perceive to be good work. So what is the answer to the question posed in the title of this article? A principal goal in this case, is to lower the instance of issues surrounding the work itself. This relies on allowing others to work on tasks the output of which they hold a stake in, and in realms which they desire to impress others within.
How Much Do They Care for the Quality of Output?
Suppose you’re in charge of rolling out IT equipment for the office next door to yours. The task revolves around keeping proper inventory, records of employees who’ve received each piece of hardware, and properly installing the hardware. Those who will be using the new tools are likely to be sensitive to how accurately they’re set up and kept track of. Should you, as someone external to this specific office environment, take ownership of this task, it’s likely you won’t take every user preference into account. You may care for the quality of output you provide, but the mere fact that you lack the experience of being a part of that office day-to-day will increase your chances of missing important details.
Assigning ownership of the overall task to a representative of the end-user group, (a person who works in that environment), will infuse the output of that work with the details required to lower issues overall. They will be doing the work with their future contentment in mind, thereby holding a personal stake in the quality of output they provide. When the results matter to a specific group of people, assigning ownership of the things that should be done to representatives of that same group is a beneficial thing to do. This is not always possible depending on the context, but you should always try ways to give ownership to those who hold a stake in the output of specific work in question.
Assigning ownership in such cases should be an action you are confident in taking. Rather than fearing the loss of control over the output of the work in progress, you should be confident in increase the chances of its success. You’ll decrease the instance of issues, and will take a step towards strengthening your relationship with those stakeholders.
Responsibility and the Desire to Impress
As you gain experience in your field, the day-to-day work you continue to take part in stops making you feel prideful. The things you’re responsible become day-to-day activities, and you will become jaded toward them. You’ll begin to view things pragmatically, whether it be in your organization or in your personal life, and you’ll perhaps lose the magical desire to impress others with your work. The desire to impress is an important one to mention. It changes behavior of those you see around you day-to-day. People go to the gym with the the desire to impress. They upgrade their cars, buy name-brand shoes, and read books to be perceived in more favorable ways by society at large.
The desire to impress is powerful in changing our behavior. You may be reading this article in order to learn something that impresses those who have no access to this knowledge, and we’re writing it in order to impress you with our product. This desire people have should be taken advantage of any chance you get. Use it to drive positive change in the world around you, and to ensure that things get done how you want them to.
When you have a task that can be outsourced and changed in its ownership, analyze who around you yearns to impress the most. There may be more qualified individuals for the job, but consider placing more importance on their desire to impress you and the ones around them in your analysis of qualified candidates. Attention to detail stretches far and wide. Though their qualifications may not impress you when compared to others, get a feel for how attentive to the details they’re susceptible to being. The desire to impress others will drive them to produce a perfect product. It will be something they take pride in rather than simply look to complete the list of to-dos.