Delegating effectively doesn’t come naturally to most people. I’ve coached many managers who struggle with workload because they spend precious time doing tasks their team is capable of. In my experience, great leaders and high performing teams have typically mastered the art of effective delegation…
So how do you learn to delegate better?
The same way you improve at anything. By identifying your problem, in the context of your circumstances, then tailoring a solution to it.
Some managers are happy to delegate, but they don’t know how to do it well. This creates ambiguity for employees, and the manager is likely to micromanage them as a result.
Some managers hesitate to delegate because they believe they can do things better themselves. Or they fear the consequences if something goes wrong. This disempowers employees and can breed a toxic culture where people are afraid to take the initiative.
Which category do you fall into? How about your boss?
I break effective delegation down into three layers: foundation, practices and mindset.
1) Laying a strong foundation for effective delegation
First class documentation and training are prerequisites for effective delegation. Team members must understand their role within the team and the broader organisation. And they should be able to access up-to-date policies and processes with ease.
Content-rich documentation is clearly more effective. I advise storing your policies and processes in cloud-based collaborative software like Google Suite. These can be in the form of bullet points, prose, flowcharts, or whatever works best for the audience. This allows you to control who can edit them, track changes and feedback, and automatically update them for every team member to reference. Done well, documentation will also serve as a valuable resource for future process design and optimisation.
Working hand-in-hand with documentation is training. Your documentation may be accurate and up-to-date, but you still need to validate its usefulness and ensure your team is using it. The best way to do that is basic training for new hires, and periodically for all team members. This is all too often skipped in early stage startups to “save time”. Trust me when I say that is a missed opportunity. Even a couple of hours spent training a new hire will empower them and save you weeks of needless interruptions: “how do I do x/y/z?”
2) Best practices for effective delegation
Practices to avoid when delegating:
Not delegating at all! Managers who fail to delegate often become a toxic leader. This is rarely a deliberate ploy to prevent progression. Usually it’s caused by an emotional block.
Setting ambiguous expectations; getting ambiguous outcomes. Ever heard the phrase: ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer? Telling people to “hustle” and “get s**t done” is not delegation, and it almost guarantees you won’t get what you want. Be specific.
Suffocating initiative with micromanagement. Once you’ve delegated a task, resist the temptation to check in by Slack / email / tap on the shoulder every 2 hours.
Practices to embrace when delegating:
Clearly define tasks, using SMART goals. SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound. E.g. I need you to make a list of 50 target businesses for our new product, meeting xyz criteria, 24 hours before the launch strategy meeting next Thursday.
Delegate responsibility; not accountability. Remember, whoever delegates the task remains accountable for the outcome. If it goes well, you praise the team. If it goes badly, you shoulder the blame. Effective delegation reduces the risk of things going wrong.
Be available to support, but trust your team. Await updates at predetermined times, and have an escalation process for unanticipated issues. Otherwise, be patient and have faith.
3) Adopting an effective delegation mindset
So you’ve put in place a process for delegating tasks, projects or goals. What next?
In order to make your team as effective as possible, you must only address the most serious issues that arise. At some point, a team member will ask for assistance with something you’ve delegated. How you respond will determine whether they retain responsibility for achieving the task, or you take it back from them.
When an employee comes to you with an issue related to something you delegated, it’s easy to assume your responsibility is to fix it:
Leave it with me. I’ll get things back on track.
But you should consider taking back responsibility a last resort, and typically a consequence of your bad delegation.
Something else (often less experienced) managers may do is inadvertently introduce ambiguity about responsibility:
Send me an email. I’ll take a look when I get round to it.
Statements like this put the project in a state of uncertainty. And there’s no detail in the message to help anyone move closer to the defined outcome.
The mindset that’s most difficult to adopt is one that takes responsibility out of the hands of the manager, and puts it in the hands of the person to whom the task has been assigned: “I see the issue. What’s your plan for moving the project forward?”
I see the issue. What’s your plan for moving the project forward?
You’ve made clear the ball is in the employee’s court and, more importantly, responsibility for completing the task remains with them. Your statement reinforces that, and gives the employee renewed confidence they’re the right person for the job.
Now that’s effective delegation.