Contents
Leaders with strong delegation skills increase their business revenue by a third more than managers with low delegation skills. We tell how delegation differs from outsourcing and how to competently transfer tasks
What is delegation
Delegation is the transfer of tasks or competencies from a leader to a subordinate. Delegation differs from the usual distribution of responsibilities in that it transfers tasks from the “world” of the leader.
For example, the manager has a meeting with potential partners. He knows that it is important for them to visually see the indicators of the future project. To illustrate the pitch, an effective leader will come up with the content of the presentation, and delegate the design to the employee. While the employee draws it up, the manager will be able to prepare for the negotiations.
What is suitable for delegation:
Simple tasks that take time and distract from strategic work: registration for events, booking tickets and accommodation for a business trip, manually transferring the list to an Excel spreadsheet.
Tasks that you can teach an employee to perform in order not to do them yourself: preparation of official requests to government agencies, collection of information about the customer or competitors.
Tasks in which the manager may lack competencies: maintenance of personal pages in social networks, development of a business card site, data analysis.
Tasks that overlap with other important processes, but must be completed anyway: representation of the company when the manager is on a business trip, simple communication with contractors.
What are the benefits of delegation
If a manager relieves himself of part of the routine, he frees up time to work on higher-level tasks: planning the development of the company, analyzing reports, negotiating with new partners. Delegation helps to reduce the risk of missed deadlines, and this increases the efficiency of the company as a whole.
A Gallup study showed that the average revenue of Inc.500 companies whose leaders have a high level of delegation in 2013 was 33% higher than that of firms whose leaders have a low level of delegation [1].
In addition, when you delegate part of your work to employees, you give them the opportunity to adopt the skills and knowledge that help them make important decisions. This growth of employees accelerates the overall pace of work, and also protects the team in emergency situations. The team will know what to do if the manager gets sick or goes on vacation.
When to start delegating
Focus on your schedule. If work has begun to take too much time and personal resources and steals vacation days, it is worth redistributing the load. You can give part of the tasks to current employees or hire a personal assistant, including a remote one.
Miller’s law will help determine the amount of load. In his article “The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Two,” the American psychologist George Miller noted that a person can retain no more than 7 ± 2 elements in short-term memory [2]. If during the day the number of things that you need to constantly remember approaches this value or exceeds it, this is a signal to change the schedule.
Why not everyone can delegate
There are six main reasons why leaders refuse to delegate part of their tasks to subordinates or stop doing so when they encounter problems.
Choose the wrong employee. Before giving a task, you need to understand whether the subordinate has the knowledge and skills to complete it, how the task from the management correlates with his career interests and goals, and what kind of workload the employee has. It is better to delegate to employees who are as close as possible to the “OS”: they are the ones who know all the details of daily tasks.
They don’t want to explain. Managers feel like they are wasting their time explaining when they could be doing business. But if you do not give clear instructions, the employee will not learn anything and will not be able to lighten the workload of the manager. The more specific and clear you explain what you want from a colleague, why, when and in what form it is needed, the more likely he will do everything right.
Delegate to a group. The employee must understand what exactly and for how long he is responsible. It is worth giving the employee the entire task at once, so that he sees his area of responsibility.
They assign the wrong tasks. People tend to pass decisions on which others depend in order to avoid responsibility or condemnation [3]. But the manager does not have the right to transfer some cases to employees if this is not their level of decision-making. Such cases include:
- definition of the mission, goals, strategy, development plan of the company;
- personnel decisions;
- onboarding – immersion of new employees in the company’s processes and familiarity with the product;
- calculation of team performance, bonuses and penalties;
- decisions on major financial issues, tasks with a high degree of risk or importance.
Interfere with tasks that have already been passed. Fear of losing control and perfectionism cause some managers to jump in and take tasks back from employees with the words “me”. It is important to remember that workers who are engaged in the assigned task for the first time may perform it more slowly than they want. But that’s okay – it’s part of their training.
A competent employee will learn and work faster. If he has questions during work, it is worth answering them and giving recommendations, but not doing them instead of the employee. And comments are more useful to give to the result.
Leave no time for checking. For a delegated task, allow time for feedback and refinement. Feedback is a key success factor in delegation. It helps to increase both the employee’s self-confidence and the authority of the manager. Therefore, if the report needs to be submitted on the following Monday, it is worth setting the deadline for Friday so that there is a day left for revision.
Moreover, if you accept work that does not suit you in terms of quality, the employee will not learn how to perform tasks as needed. And the leader will constantly correct mistakes.
How to learn to delegate
You need to figure out why you are not doing this yet and where there may be difficulties. For example, perfectionism, fear of losing control or authority may require work with a psychologist. Lack of time, fear of making mistakes in an employee are solved through the development of soft skills and the introduction of time management principles.
To effectively delegate: