Delegation is the act of giving tasks to other staff of your team. It elevates efficiency and decreases the obstacles on your shoulders. It’s also necessary to improve others and free yourself up for more tactful work.
The process of delegating is much easier said than done. Effective bosses need to learn how to delegate and what they can do to guarantee success.
Let’s consider why so many find delegating hard. We’ll also mention how to extend delegation skills that are necessary for leadership success.
Delegation is the assignment of authority to another person (normally from a manager to a subordinate) to carry out specific activities. It is the process of distributing and entrusting work to another person, and therefore one of the core concepts of managementleadership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegation
The significance of delegation.
At the most basic level, delegation is giving work to others. Delegation usually occurs when you deliver work that you could do yourself to someone else on your teamwork. While you delegate, you show trust by transferring the initial authority of the work to someone else. This makes delegation a teamwork activity.
You, as the boss, stay involved in observing the quality and timeliness of the activity. Organizations flourish when bosses successfully delegate. When delegation happens, responsibilities and authority are shared across people and teams.
Studies show that delegation is highly related to:
- business-meeting-delegation
- Organizational activities
- Decreasing stress level
- Target
- Job satisfaction
The delegation also lives and improves your staff members by giving them new chances to develop skills. You grow the strengths and capacities of your members by successfully delegating.
Delegation is also part of each person’s authority journey. Changing your energy from being an individual contributor to a leader through delegation will help you improve your career by giving you more time to do more meaningful work.
Why some people find it difficult to delegate?
There are multiple reasons why managers find delegating difficult. As you read the text below of reasons for not delegating, please make a note of which one’s associated with you.
Time: Lack of time is the most related reason for not delegating. It assumes that charging someone else takes more time than doing the activity themselves. Exceptionally when limitations are tight, you may be more likely to move up your sleeves and do the action yourself.
Identity: Over the last few years, you have put in your area of expertise and your professional skills. New leaders often have their identity and sense of value at the office related to being influential individual contributors.
Emotional attachment: Many people are too emotionally invested in the activity to give it to someone else. For instance, you already have an idea in your mind of the final product, and you do not like someone else getting it differently.
Guilt: You might feel guilty when giving work to busy members, particularly when you do not have functional authority over them. Responsibility is strong — nobody wants to feel as if they are dumping work on already busy colleagues.
Trust: There might be one person (or a couple of people) on your team whom you don’t trust to assign tasks. Perhaps they don’t yet have the required skill level or have not done to your expectations in the past. You may not even be conscious that you don’t trust them. Bottom line, particularly for crucial projects, many people trust themselves to do the best work more than others.
Fear of losing: I talked about how panic of failure is a psychological driver for so many experiences in the workplace. You might feel that the best way to stop the possibility of losing is to do the work by yourself.
Authority: You might be avoiding delegating since you are uneasy using your functional authority. This is particularly common when someone is lately promoted and now observes people who used to be their peers.
Rewards: Those in central authority usually report that they are estimated and rewarded more for their work activities than their management expertise. It could be more challenging to prioritize when your boss does not help or acknowledge your attempts to delegate.
How to recognize when to delegate?
Let’s take a glimpse at an example of when delegation is significant. Alice was exhausted and having a hard time focusing. She was a software engineer and was recently promoted to boss of a team of five. Alice had sought the promotion, but it ended in her doing all her prior engineering activities and the new management position.
She spent all her day in back-to-back meetings resulting in her having to work during the mornings and weekends. Everyone on her team was confused, Alice said. She could not assign anything that was on her own. Alice’s story is representative of trouble for new and seasoned bosses alike: delegating activities to others.
As indicated in her example, bosses who try to “do it all” become overwhelmed at work and risk failure. Many people put themselves in the same position. We have recognized the obstacles holding you back from productive delegating. Now you can start to do them by practicing.
To begin, think about these three times when delegation is the best idea:
Discover a task you have done so many times that it no longer offers you a new or unified intellectual experience. What feels extra for you may be a successful opportunity for someone else on your team.
Open up the calendar and look at your standing meetings. What sessions do you attend that one or more of your reports also attend? Ask yourself if they could hold that meeting without you, freeing up two hours of your time every week.
Check your to-do list for issues that you are doing that fall under the job title of one of your colleagues. You might be doing something – or many things – that must be done as part of someone else’s position.
How to understand who you should delegate to?
A necessary component of flourishing delegation is assigning the right task to the right person.
As a delegator, you want to make sure that you assign the task to someone who can take to the occasion and complete it. You are no more responsible for personally assigning the task. But you are responsible for ensuring the task is accomplished.
You must delegate to the correct member and offer them the tools and instructions that they need to do it thoroughly. Nevertheless, that is easier, much said than done. Finding the right staff to give a task to can usually be challenging for a good boss.
What should you search for? How could you assess team members that you intend for a delegated task?
There are four necessary qualities to look for in staff who can be optimal alternatives for delegation.
What are delegation qualities?
Ambitious: They are keen to go above and beyond for any activities they receive.
Resourceful: They could do a lot with only what is available.
Listeners: They effectively intake and analyze information assigned to them.
Detail-oriented: They pay attention to the little things and take them into account.
Team members that have some — or all — of these qualifications are the main options to take care of significant tasks for you. This is because each of those indices concentrates on a different element of the delegation procedure.
That element could be listening to intake of all of the criteria or being tactful enough to never say no to a new challenge. Nevertheless, it’s necessary to note that these qualities don’t commonly guarantee accomplishment when delegating. There are still many options, such as your ability to apply the instructions, the given schedule, and the tools. And the most significant variable is the assistance you provide.
Your role as a boss is to make sure that the person you’re delegating to feels good while doing the job. You should be the one they consider a resource. They can come to you for counsel and advice. You will play an essential role in guaranteeing that your manager has the support they need to end the task. You can — and should — do various things to assist the person who has received this task.
You can provide support by:
Being available for any inquiry
Offering proper instructions
Pinpointing tools at their disposal
Offering encouragement and belief
When you contemplate delegation, it’s necessary to know that your manager’s success is also your success.
Assigning the task and supporting the manager who is now in charge of it is a crucial role that you’ll always have to play.
By being supportive and helping the managers responsible for the task, you can make sure that the project flourishes in the right way without managing it by yourself.
This sets both you and your manager up for accomplishment, and everybody will get success.
What are Productive delegation practices?
DO communicate who is assigned what tasks and why.
Use one-on-ones and team sessions to identify individual and team targets and the distribution of work across members. Try to make the most excellent match between delegations and individuals to improve engagement.
DO see yourself as a teacher or a coach.
Supply all the information and instructions the person requires for the activity.
Clearly distinguish the completion criteria so that it’s obvious when the task is done complete and successful.
DO empower and support them in their directions.
Allow your members to understand that you are at hand and welcome questions and instructions.
Offer productive feedback, guidance, and course correction in a polite manner.
DO flex to what the colleagues needs.
Everyone is at a different phase in their job development and will need something different from you.
DO hold people valuable.
Delegating means that you have transmitted authority for the task to someone else. But, as a manager, you already have to hold them essential. Usually, managers can become too “hands-off” and get too out of touch with their colleague’s work.
DO grant yourself a reward.
The cheapest reward is time. For instance, if you delegate a weekly session to someone else, don’t let another session use up that hour.
Underline that time on the calendar to work on a project that is critical to you or will offer you an opportunity to succeed.
Six delegation instructions to avoid
Never micromanage.
Grant your staff the time and space to do the work and avoid controlling too frequently. If you co-create meeting times and limitations at the outset, you won’t need to micromanage the project.
Never take work back after you’ve assigned it.
Even if affairs are not going well, stick with the person and increase your level of support.
Never focus on the negative.
Let for hiccups and tiny failures. Be positive, and ensure that you don’t squash hope.
Never be closed to new visions or new directions of doing the work.
Delegating means transmitting ownership of the work to another member team. Their final product will be different from what you could have done. Be open to the diversity of ideas and allow their creative expression to succeed.
Never show others’ work as your own or without proper explanation.
Be open to those doing the work and provide them credit by name in sessions and written interactions.
Never give up on yourself.
Becoming skilled at delegating is a trip of fits and starts. I later worked with a customer who had 30 years of management experience. They still encounter delegation challenges with various people and situations.
The advantages of delegating.
Sharing assignments for accomplishing tasks has many positive aftermaths for teams and companies.
Delegating associates to an organizational culture of trust and authority. In high-trust companies, leaders concentrate on the whole person. They encourage their members to shine professionally and individually.
They give members power over how they accomplish their jobs, manage their schedules, and complete their tasks. A study by Paul J Zak indicates that staff who work in high trust companies have improved:
- Job satisfaction
- Engagement
- Performance
On a personal level, you as the manager will also benefit from enhancing your work with delegating.
You will understand that you have more time on your calendar and optimized opportunities for doing activities. You will also have lower stress and better visibility.
