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Delegating is a skill set that doesn’t come naturally to many people. Don’t be hard on yourself if you’re a new manager or business owner and find delegating hard to do. The good news is that you can practice and improve over time.
The better you get at delegating, the more successful you’ll be as a leader. This article provides a few tips that you can use to delegate effectively, increase teamwork, and improve your team’s productivity.
The importance of delegation
Delegation is an important management skill. It’s also a valuable tool that entrepreneurs and managers use to lead effectively. As a leader, you can’t (and shouldn’t!) do everything by yourself. Look at delegation as a part of your leadership journey—a transition from being an individual contributor to a manager.
Relinquishing control and assigning tasks can maximize your team’s productivity, reducing stress among workers and improving motivation and job satisfaction. Simply put, businesses thrive when team members share authority and responsibilities.
Other benefits of delegating include:
- It gives you the ability to focus on activities that can yield the highest returns and grow the company.
- It gives members of your team opportunities to learn and develop new skills.
- It keeps your team members engaged and boosts morale.
- It helps improve communication and trust between team members.
- It shows your team that you respect their abilities and trust their decisions.
- It helps improve efficiency, productivity, and time management.
- It helps reduce stress for management/leadership in the long run.
5 Rules of delegation
Understand that delegation isn’t simply offloading a burdensome task to a member of your team. When you delegate, you transfer specific tasks to another, entrusting and empowering them. Of course, there may be tasks that only you can do, such as hiring and reviewing performance.
To delegate effectively, you need to know each team member’s strengths and weaknesses. This way, you can be confident in assigning tasks and transferring the responsibility for the activities and end results to the right team member.
Too many times, leaders waste both time and energy either by doing a task themselves or assigning it but micromanaging the process. Both approaches lower the team’s productivity, limit team members’ effectiveness, and may even increase operating costs.
Consider these rules to determine when you should delegate a specific task:
- Delegate recurring tasks that don’t need your personal touch. Look at your to-do list and hand over tasks that don’t require your expertise. These include smaller tasks like booking your business flights and scheduling your meetings. Even if you enjoy doing these things, recognize that the hour you spend coordinating your schedule is better spent handling matters only you can do.
- Delegate tedious tasks. Every role comes with its own set of tedious and time-consuming tasks. You may not be able to delegate combing through every project’s budget, but you can assign tasks like posting and replying to comments on your social media accounts. Filing is another time-consuming task that you can easily offload.
- Delegate tasks that allow members of your team to learn and develop new skills. Check your schedule and identify activities you can assign to the right people to move projects and initiatives forward. For example, if you’re needed to consult, review, and approve every step of a project, find a way to delegate so you’re less involved in every small detail. In this scenario, you can be present at the planning stage of a project. Then, teach and assign a team member to review day-to-day activities that don’t need your attention. You can even assign another person to approve the purchase of supplies and materials.
- Delegate and ask for help when you need it. Simply put, if you won’t have time to complete a task by doing it on your own, ask your team for help. Find ways to delegate time-sensitive tasks to other members of your team. Event planning is an example of a time-sensitive task. Since this activity has a lot of moving parts, you can enlist someone else to deal with the caterers, book the venue, and send out invitations.
- Delegate tasks that someone in your team can do better and faster than you. You should also assign tasks that you’re not good at to others who have better-matched skills. Examples might be creating graphics for social media posts and sourcing images for your website. When you delegate these tasks to skilled individuals, the tasks may be completed more quickly and efficiently and the outcomes are likely to be better.
7 delegation tips for managers
Effective leaders produce great leaders within their teams. Your role as a manager and leader is to guide your team and deliver results. You’re not supposed to do everything while your teammates wait for your orders on what to do next.
Here are some guidelines that can help you delegate effectively.
- Know each worker’s strengths and weaknesses
- Pick the right person for the right task
- Provide context and desired outcomes
- Provide resources and training
- Allow for failure
- Provide and ask for feedback
- Give credit
Know each worker’s strengths and weaknesses
Knowing your team’s individual strengths and weaknesses is the core of effective delegating. Delegating becomes easier when you leverage and play to your workers’ strengths. Your coworkers will appreciate being given tasks that they know they excel at.
Pick the right person
One of the most important aspects of successful delegation is choosing the right person for the job. Consider your colleagues’ experience and skills, but also consider whether they have time to train and get acquainted with the task you want them to do.
You’re transferring authority and responsibility when you delegate, so it’s important to note each person’s preferred work style and professional development plan. For instance, someone looking for management experience will likely benefit from supervising a particular project. You should also consider if adding this task to your staff’s plate may mean needing to reassign their other responsibilities to avoid burnout.
Provide context and desired outcomes
Delegating well is a skill set that requires clear communication. When you delegate work, begin with the big picture and give clear details of the task’s purpose and desired results. You’ll also be more successful if you give the person some context on why you chose them. Tell them why you think this is a great opportunity for them to grow or learn new skills.
For example, if you need to set up affiliates, you may choose the person on your team who has experience doing it to lead the project. Then, provide a timeline and the metrics you’ll use to measure their success. Allow time for proper training, questions, opportunities to follow up, and rework if necessary.
Provide resources and training
As mentioned earlier, you should also transfer the decision-making process when you delegate. Provide ample resources and training for the person taking on the responsibility. You may need to be available to provide guidance and reassurance the first time you assign a task, but over time the delegated individual should feel and be empowered to work autonomously.
The point of delegating is to free up your time and take work off your plate. Set up a delegation process that lets you assign the right tasks and check-in without the need for a lot of conversation. You may benefit from technologies like task management apps. Be willing to invest in resources that can make delegation and collaboration easier.
Allow for failure
When you delegate, you give the person control over decision-making and methods they’ll use to accomplish the task. Whoever takes on the assignment may have a different way of doing it than you would. Instead of forcing your team to do things your way, let them forge their own paths, allowing room for occasional failure and hopefully long-term success.
This doesn’t mean your teammates will fail, but that they have your permission to experiment and take a new approach to doing things. Allowing your staff to do things their way also empowers them because it means you trust their judgment.
However, even though you’re delegating authority, decision-making, and responsibility, you still need to maintain overall accountability. You will also need to help team members learn and recover from failure without micromanaging.
Provide and ask for feedback
Provide feedback whenever you have a chance to check in with your workers’ progress. Most importantly, tell them what you think after they’ve completed the assignment or project. Of course, your team will greatly appreciate positive feedback.
When necessary, offer constructive feedback so your team knows what changes to make next time you assign them a similar task. One of the best ways to give constructive feedback is to focus on specifics. For instance, you can’t tell a team member that their work needs improvement and leave it at that. Instead, you might say that how they structured their presentation was excellent, but it was missing a few bits of key information. Then, address what they needed to include and where.
Lastly in the area of feedback, ask your team for any input on how you’ve been delegating so far. Ask them if they think you’ve given clear instructions and if you’re giving enough time for tasks to be completed. Use open-ended questions to draw out their ideas on how you can improve. You can also ask if they are happy to take on the same or similar tasks in the future. If they give you constructive feedback, be sure to listen to their suggestions and make appropriate changes.
Give credit
Giving credit is not just saying “great job” or “good work”—although your team would probably accept a meaningful compliment. Giving credit means truly appreciating your team’s contribution by recognizing that you have achieved success because of their work.
Make sure to include your team when you claim success. For instance, credit the team member who grew your social media account or brought you the idea of using affiliates to advertise.
Tools and resources
Here are some recommended tools and resources on delegation and efficiency.
- Project management tools. When you assign a task to someone, you also need to empower them to make decisions and lead others when necessary. With the help of project management tools like Jira and Wrike, you can name team members as the assignee for a task or a lead for a project. These apps also let the whole team see their progress, making it easy to communicate with each other and track timelines.
- Task management apps. Task management apps like Asana help your team prioritize tasks since each task has a dedicated space. This makes it easier for the team to work on things together. It’s also helpful that every assignee has access to the task space so that nobody will be left out of the loop.
- Google Drive. Google Drive has many uses, of course. But as a manager or business owner, you can also utilize this storage solution as an easy-to-access knowledge base for training materials. Since it’s your responsibility to make sure your team has access to resources, you can put all the materials in a Google Drive document that can be easily shared with your team and updated as needed.
- Dedicated communication channel. Establish and utilize a dedicated channel for communication within your team, especially if you’re working remotely. You can use apps like Slack to create a separate channel where each team member can get in touch with you and share files if necessary for instant feedback.
- Zoom. Anyone who works from home or has attended a webinar or any other online event is familiar with Zoom by now. You can use the platform for remote team meetings, presentations, and celebratory sessions to congratulate and credit team members who helped you reach your business goals.
Learn how to delegate and maximize your team’s productivity
Improving your delegation skills has many benefits. Not only can effective delegating boost your team’s productivity, but it also allows you to leverage the strengths and capabilities of each coworker. In turn, you develop engaged workers who trust your leadership.
