A Question of Delegation

Delegation is a key skill for business leaders, fostering growth, promoting responsibility and accountability, and providing recognition. It benefits both parties: one experiences personal growth and increased authority, while the other gains more time for essential management tasks.

By delegating, you free up your time to focus on high-priority activities. This practice is also crucial for succession planning. It’s problematic if, in your absence, others need to learn your responsibilities from scratch. Such gaps have led to the downfall of companies. Effective delegation is an acquired skill, which many managers find difficult to do. There can also be a misunderstanding of what it is.

It is not:

• Merely balancing the workload between individual members of the team.
• Dishing out parcels of work in an unplanned manner.
• Dumping tasks you do not have time for or do not wish to do yourself.
• Assigning a task

Here are some questions identified by senior managers on a recent workshop.

What are the best procedures and how can I be more effective?

It is important to understand what delegation is and how it differs from assigning a task.

“Delegation means entrusting authority to someone else to act on your behalf to achieve specified results.”

When you assign a task, you are asking them to do the job in a specified way. You instruct them what to do and what results need to be achieved. If the person does it to your specifications, you are totally accountable. 

When you delegate a task, you provide the resources and specify the results you want. They must know exactly what results are expected of them, what resources and authority they have, and to what extent they are accountable. You leave the person to decide how they will achieve the results (within the confines of their competency, company policy, and the law!). They are then accountable for that task, but you, as manager, are still responsible for the results.

How much choice you allow the person to do the task will depend on their current skill and motivation level. Less experienced people may need more guidance from you. All this requires careful planning.

How do I get better use of my team?

One of the best ways to utilise your team is to delegate, as this will grow their skills, motivate them with more responsibility and free up your time to manage your tasks more effectively.

What more can I delegate?

This is a question you can be asking yourself daily. It is not always easy to know who you can delegate to if everyone seems busy. With careful planning and knowing your team’s strengths, it is often possible to delegate more than you think.

Just because a task has been delegated to you, it doesn’t mean you cannot delegate it on to someone else. There may be someone in your team who is more experienced or has better knowledge than you.

Ask yourself “If I were not here for a month, which tasks could not be done?” Or “What am I not getting done because I am not delegating?” Hopefully, it should be almost nothing. If you are left with plenty, then you are not delegating enough.

Tasks you can delegate are those that they can do:

• Better.
• Faster.
• Sooner.
• More cheaply.
• Or will develop their abilities.

How do I select the right skills, strengths and availability?

A key aspect of delegation is trust. The more you know your team, the easier it is to delegate accordingly. To make this easier, you can keep a matrix of who has what skills and strengths that are needed for a particular task. Various models are available on-line.

Sometimes if you are delegating to develop that person, you may delegate even though they don’t currently have the right capabilities. You are probably where you are today because someone delegated to you.

How do I ensure the team take it on board?

This is where good communication skills come in. By explaining clearly why you have chosen them, what outcomes are needed and getting feedback on their understanding helps motivation and uptake. Checking of understanding is paramount.

What is required in following up deadlines and boundaries?

Lack of monitoring and follow up is very often the downfall of delegation. You are still responsible for the results, but they are accountable for meeting the required deadlines, staying within the boundaries of their authority, achieving quality standards and the success of the task.

Agreeing to monitor progress at a certain stage before the deadline can also be helpful, especially with people new to the task. When boundaries of their authority have been set at the start, they are more likely to stay within them. With a big task, setting milestones may be appropriate. If they know they can call on your support, then this can help avert problems.

Follow up also gives the opportunity for praise. If things go wrong, I recommend you look at your method of delegation first.

Eight steps of delegation

1. Reasons               Explain why you have chosen them and why the task needs to be done.
2. Results                 Be specific in what results you require and that they will be accountable for.
3. Resources           Ensure they have all the resources they need and the authority to use them.
4. Deadlines           Agree the realistic deadlines involved.
5. Feedback            Seek their ideas and feedback on how they want to go about this.
6. Monitor               Be clear on how you will monitor progress especially if it is a big task.
7. Support               Offer your support especially if they are new to the role.
8. Evaluate              It is important to evaluate and praise after the task has been completed.

If you have further questions about delegation, please contact me.

Also published on Medium.