Overwhelmed team leaders and managers: are you delegating enough? Delegating frees you up to focus on your priorities and gives you time and space to think and act more strategically. Delegation also builds the skills of team and direct reports so that they can grow professionally. And delegating well will enable you and your team to achieve your targets and accomplish more.
What’s getting in the way of delegating? Maybe you think no one can do the task as well as you can. Or maybe you don’t have time to figure out what can and should be delegated. Or maybe you don’t quite know how to delegate, so prefer to do it yourself. Letting go is scary, especially when you’re a high-performing perfectionist.
But with a little up-front planning, you can become a skilled delegator and reap all the benefits that delegation offers. Hassan Osman, project management office leader at Cisco, wrote a great, quick read you might want to check out: Effective Delegation of Authority: A (Really) Short Book for New Managers About How to Delegate Work Using a Simple Delegation Process.
Here are a couple of tips from the book that I’ve used and have passed onto my clients:
- Before you delegate, get clear on outcome you want
- Find the right person for the job OR a natural leader who will figure it out
- If this is a big job, or a relatively new hire, delegate in a meeting instead of over email so that you can be sure they understand the task
- Describe the task in terms of goals and outcomes (and any context required for them to understand the task), without prescribing how they should do it. This allows them to feel ownership of the job and gives them the freedom to grow by figuring it out on their own
- Describe how the task will benefit them and help them meet their own goals
- And set clear checkpoints and limits -these are clear timelines where you expect certain milestones.
Try it out, let me know how it went.
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