Practice lab · 10 min
Leadership Lab
Practise delegation, feedback and difficult conversations before you have them for real. Practise on realistic situations, one step at a time.
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Practise delegation, feedback and difficult conversations before you have them for real.
Situations to practise on
- Handing over a task you care about
- You need to hand a piece of work you usually do yourself to a teammate who has not done it before.
- Work that keeps arriving late
- A team member’s work has arrived late three times this month. They are otherwise good and well liked.
- Telling someone their idea won’t go ahead
- Someone on your team put real effort into a proposal. It is not going ahead, and you need to tell them.
- Two teammates who are clashing
- Two people on your team have stopped cooperating and each has complained to you about the other.
The steps
- What outcome do you want — for the work and for the person?
- How might this look from their side?
- Your opening lines Say the point early, kindly and specifically.
- Questions you would ask, rather than instructions you would give
- What happens next, and who owns it?
Afterwards, ask yourself
Which part of this would you find hardest in real life, and why?
Lessons behind this lab
- Delegation — Handing over the outcome, not just the task — with the context and authority to match. (7 min · Practising)
- Feedback and coaching — Helping people grow by asking more and telling less. (7 min · Practising)
- Difficult employees, difficult managers — Separating the behaviour from the person, and dealing with it directly and fairly. (8 min · Deeper)
- Difficult conversations — Preparing for and holding the conversation you have been avoiding. (8 min · Practising)