How many managers in your organization waste the time and talent they should delegate to perform tasks? Research shows that an alarming 41% of activity managers are engaged in projects that can and should be conducted by people who report to them. While rolling up your sleeves and phasing out these tasks may feel good, it is a detriment to people who should develop their abilities through executive functions. Lead your level or get out of trouble and let others do it.
Delegation means “invest decisions, powers, and functions into another.” When working with executive leaders on strategic coach engagement, we first determine which types of tasks can be delegated in general. Here is a partial list of delegates to consider:
- Repeated decisions and actions that others can handle
- You don’t have the priority you have time to deal with, but others can
- Tactical aspects of the project
- Meeting attendance
Meeting attendance is an obvious area of commissioning. Consider the meetings you attended in the past month: including yourself and one or more direct reports include? Eliminate the repetitive nature of people attending meetings in the same area. Research shows that 20% of conference participants should not be there. Should it be?
When you delegate tasks and decisions to others, there are four elements:
- Power: The power and autonomy to make relevant decisions have been declared.
- Ability: People have or can acquire knowledge, skills and resources to get the job done.
- Accountability: The responsibility for completing tasks or making decisions is clearly communicated and accepted.
- Assessment: Time after completing the task or deciding the review results.
Because of their failure to delegate, leaders often become bottlenecks in the activities and resources of the organization. With the speed of events and communication in today’s business environment, several levels of recognition must be waited for, or too many leaders in the disk are killers. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings put it, “Companies rarely die because they move too fast, and they often die because they move too slowly.” An effective exercise to overcome this problem is to visually draw tasks and decisions in the group and then determine who should be the best in charge of everyone.
Stick to: Before you start deciding which activities and decisions to delegate, first consider the following: Are all these activities and decisions still necessary? There is no point in delegating projects that should not exist in the first place. Take the chainsaw to your day planner and cut off something that doesn’t continue to drive value and help you achieve your goals.
The most common delegation trap is always delegating to the same person. While I understand that most leaders have their preferred person, gliding is the secret to burnout. Avoid the temptation to delegate most decisions and tasks to the same person. This will ensure they have the ability and energy to assist with things that are really important. It will also help you develop others as people in the future and make sure there is no opportunity to show what they can contribute so they won’t feel alienated.
Once you have successfully delegated decisions and tasks to a wider range of people, provide advanced guidance, but don’t micromanage how they complete the tasks. The power of diversity of thought is that once you enter the evaluation phase of a commissioned task, others may take different approaches and techniques and add them to the tool suite. Also, be aware of the delegated person, but keep looking to bring you back to the mix. Reverse delegation is not allowed.
When you initially spread the entrusted wings, completing the entrusted action plan may help. Here is a simple one-page overview I created to help ensure the delegation is as smooth and successful as possible. It includes a list of key delegation standards, such as “capability is sufficient” and “accountability” to provide a successful game plan.
Effective empowerment enables leaders to invest more time in thinking and planning for their business. The undelegated picture is the leaders running on the active treadmill, taking on more work than they need, sweating, every little task and messing up the place. Step into the treadmills, stock tasks, decisions and meetings, and develop a delegated action plan to ensure effective calming. Lead your level.
