FREE online courses on The Art of Delegation - Basics of Delegating - What to delegate

 

There is always the question of what to delegate and what to do yourself, and you must take a long term view on this: you want to delegate as much as possible to develop you staff to be as good as you are now.

 

The starting point is to consider the activities you used to do before you were promoted. You used to do them when you were more junior, so someone junior can do them now. Tasks in which you have experience are the easiest for you to explain to others and so to train them to take over. You thus use your experience to ensure that the task is done well, rather than to actually perform the task yourself. In this way you gain time for your other duties and someone else becomes as good as your once were (increasing the strength of the group).

 

Tasks in which your staff has more experience must be delegated to them. This does not mean that you relinquish responsibility because they are expert, but it does mean that the default decision should be theirs. To be a good manager though, you should ensure that they spend some time in explaining these decisions to you so that you learn their criteria.

 

Decisions are a normal managerial function: these too should be delegated - especially if they are important to the staff. In practice, you will need to establish the boundaries of these decisions so that you can live with the outcome, but this will only take you a little time while the delegation of the remainder of the task will save you much more.

 

In terms of motivation for your staff, you should distribute the more mundane tasks as evenly as possible; and sprinkle the more exciting onces as widely. In general, but especially with the boring tasks, you should be careful to delegate not only the performance of the task but also its ownership. Task delegation, rather than task assignment, enables innovation. The point you need to get across is that the task may be changed, developed, upgraded, if necessary or desirable. So someone who collates the monthly figures should not feel obliged to blindly type them in every first-Monday; but should feel empowered to introduce a more effective reporting format, to use Computer Software to enhance the data processing, to suggest and implement changes to the task itself.

 

Negotiation

 

Since delegation is about handing over authority, you cannot dictate what is delegated nor how that delegation is to be managed. To control the delegation, you need to establish at the beginning the task itself, the reporting schedule, the sources of information, your availability, and the criteria of success. These you must negotiate with your staff: only by obtaining both their input and their agreement can you hope to arrive at a workable procedure.

 

After Delegation

 

Once you have delegated everything, what do you do then?

 

You still need to monitor the tasks you have delegated and to continue the development of your staff to help them exercise their authority well.

 

There are managerial functions, which you should never delegate - these are the personal/personnel ones which are often the most obvious additions to your responsibilities as you assume a managerial role. Specifically, they include motivation, training, team building, organization, praising, reprimanding, performance reviews, and promotion.

 

As a manager, you have a responsibility to represent and to develop the effectiveness of your group within the company; these are tasks you can expand to fill your available time - delegation is a mechanism for creating that opportunity.