Why delegation is important, and how to do it effectively

Being able to delegate is one of the most valuable tools you have at your disposal as a leader but done badly it can be divisive and damaging. So, why is it so useful, and how do you do it well?

There are lots of people who find it incredibly difficult to delegate at all, never mind do it well. It takes trust and confidence in your team to be able to give up direct control of a task or responsibility that impacts on your organisational performance or profitability.

Many is the frustrated employee who can’t understand why their boss won’t trust them with a project or task.

Then there are the employees who appear to have been given responsibility for something but then find themselves being micro-managed to within an inch of their professional lives.

Yet, as a leader the process of delegating routine business tasks to others leaves you with the time to focus your attention on high value tasks that are the foundation stones of sustained success.

A Gallup study found that organisations with a CEO who delegated effectively generated 33% more revenue on average than those that had no effective delegation process in place.

To put it another way, it literally pays you to delegate – as long as you’re delegating the right things and you have the right structure in place. When you delegate the wrong things, the chances are you’re not delegating to someone – you’re just dumping on them.

Delegation is about transferring to someone else direct responsibility for something related to their job or role within the organisation.

On occasion this may extend to professional development opportunities – for example, you may believe someone has the potential to be promoted into a management role and you want to give them some additional responsibility to allow them to build experience. In this case, it’s important to be clear with that individual about the context of the delegated work.

Delegation doesn’t just benefit you as a leader – it’s also an effective way of building better engagement within your team because it implies trust and, by allowing your people the greater autonomy that comes with it, it helps to build confidence.

So, how do you start to delegate effectively? Here are my tips for doing delegation well.

Be clear on what to delegate

While some tasks and responsibilities can be delegated, there are those that should be handled by you or your management team. Knowing the difference between one and the other is what really counts here.

Ignoring the things that are really part of someone else’s role (because that isn’t delegation, that’s just appropriate redistribution), what tasks or jobs do you routinely do that could be done by someone else and benefit both them and the company better?

These should be tasks that are lower value to you, but potentially higher value to them, and they should be matched to that individual’s skills, potential, and capacity.

Agree the intended outcome

There has to be context for the transfer of work. That means having a proper, structured conversation about the reasons for delegating and what you expect the result to be of the other person taking on the task or responsibility.

Explain deadlines and process and set some mutually acceptable and measurable outcomes. You also need to ensure that the other person has access to the appropriate resources and levels of authority required.

Don’t micro-manage!

No one wants to have the boss looking over their shoulder and feeding back constantly on how something should be done. But equally, you do need to make sure the person you’ve delegated the work to is able to communicate with you to ask questions and get support.

By setting a regular catch-up session – weekly, fortnightly, or monthly – you’ll each have a safe space in which to explore how the task is being managed without either one of you feeling claustrophobic (them) or out of the loop (you).

Design in failure

This may sound counterintuitive but designing failure into delegation is actually empowering to the person on the other end of the delegation process because it gives them the scope to experiment and innovate.

Don’t expect too much

You’ve had years of experience and practice performing the task or responsibility you’ve just delegated, and the chances are you can do it an awful lot quicker than the person who’s just taken it on.

One reason many people give for not delegating tasks is ‘it’s just quicker if I do it’. That may be true, but it means you’re always going to have too much stuff on your plate.

When delegating, accept that for a little while some things that take you a few minutes may take a lot longer to complete. Eventually you’ll find that they’re getting done at the same speed – or perhaps faster.

Don’t forget to assign credit, too

When something is completed and done well, be sure to publicly acknowledge it. As well as making the individual feel more valued, it also sends a clear message to others that your business has a recognition culture.

Remember, the more you delegate, the better skilled your team will become – and the more effective you’ll be at leading and managing them.

If you’d like to find out more about how to create an effective delegation framework for your business, please get in touch for an informal, no obligation chat.