Delegation Details

David Daniell and Gary Mallory were always focused on the sales side of their business – Heads Up Landscape, Albuquerque, N.M. But when the two owners split with the two other previous owners of the business, who were more production oriented, they quickly inherited more job hats and didn’t know all of the essentials of the positions they weren't familiar with.

The goal was to look for someone to run he production side of the business. “Initially, we divided up those duties amongst ourselves,” said company Vice President Daniell. “We each wore four or five hats and sat back and said, ‘OK, what do we want this organizational chart to look like?’ Unfortunately,
lots of boxes in that chart had our names in it. The goal was to get our names out of the boxes over a period of time. But we had to grow the business to be able to do that.”

Luckily, company President Mallory learned early on to embrace the power of delegation. “I met a lot of entrepreneurs at industry shows who had major problems letting go of different tasks and were then stuck doing all of the jobs themselves and weren’t growing the way they wanted to,” Mallory said. “So, I started giving up duties and just made sure I clearly defined what I wanted people to do and gave them some measurements so they could tell if they were succeeding or not. Then, I stopped looking over my shoulder all day to see if they were doing it correctly – if you do that, you might as well just keep doing the job yourself.”

Daniell, on the other hand, had to learn to let go. “What I need to do is allow good people to have a box they can work within and then allow them to do that,” he said. “I can’t second guess them or oversee them too much. We have budgets we have to hit and if there’s an unhappy customer or missed budgets, then we’ll have a discussion about it. It took me a long time to figure out how to empower people. If you can define what perimeters people can move within and then let them do that and let them make decisions, then they will learn the job.”

After spending time filling in the boxes, Heads Up had to create a system to ensure the right people are in the right jobs in the first place. To do this, the company gives each potential new employee a personality profile test and a skill assessment test. The personality profile helps determine whether a person is detail-oriented enough for accounting or dominant and aggressive enough for sales, while the skill assessment test outlines math, people and other skills so Heads Up can match the person to the job. The company also formed a relationship with a local community college that just began offering a landscape-related program. “We’re offering our support and help with instruction or to provide equipment for them to practice on,”

Daniell said, “We figure that it’s a good idea to help them get their program up and running and, in turn, we may benefit with employees later on down the road by keeping our name active in the students’ minds.”

The author is Managing Editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine and can be reached at nwisniewski@lawnandlandscape.com.