As a manager or business owner, it’s important to prioritize tasks and delegate responsibilities to your team. Delegating tasks empowers your employees and frees up your time to focus on high-impact tasks and strategic planning.
When done effectively, delegation can increase employee satisfaction, growth, and overall team productivity. In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of delegation and how it can help you improve workplace productivity.
So,
Boost Your Management Skills with These 10 Delegation Tips
Learning and cultivating a culture of proper work delegation makes you a top manager and ensures you enjoy high productivity. On top of that, your team, too, gets to grow and maximize its potential. Here are a few tips that, if well implemented, will ensure you become a top manager through incredible work delegation skills.
1. Outsource Like a Pro: Identity Which Tasks to Delegate
Identifying which tasks need delegation is the most important and will be the first step in getting the process right.
You do not need to delegate every task. People always have other things to do (daily operations); therefore, burdening them with functions that aren’t of high priority or value won’t be wise. Instead, establishing which functions out of the many on a list requires reassigning to be correctly completed on time.
Only give priority to tasks that qualify for urgent attention. Ensure you always understand the depth and scope of a task to understand whether you need to assign it to someone for better results.
2. Visualize Your Success: Defining Your Desired Outcome
Your employees should understand why you assign them extra duties and what you expect of them. Therefore, it would be advisable to clarify to your employees what goal(s) you intend to achieve by assigning them some duties.
By doing this, you ensure they understand the gravity of the responsibilities and how they will impact the bigger picture or goals of the company. Giving them this information also ensures that you gain their trust and uttermost commitment now that they know how they will be contributing toward assisting the company in achieving its goals.
Also, by visualizing the desired outcome and informing them, they can formulate an informed plan to achieve said goals efficiently.
3. Empower Your Team: Provide Resources and Authority for Success
Your team’s success when assigned new responsibilities relies on the level of permissions and the number of resources you give them. In other words, you need to properly empower your employees to enable them to deliver quality results efficiently. Therefore, please set up your employees for success by ensuring they are appropriately trained, remunerated, motivated, and enabled to deliver what they should.
On top of that, give them enough space to work and get things done. In other words, you should not be hot on their heels at every turn to find out what they are doing, how they are doing it, and when they should complete it. Finally, stop micro-managing your employees and give them room to get results in a much calmer mental state.
4. The Key to Collaboration: Establishing a Clear Communication Channel
As much as you will be handing over responsibilities to your employees, that doesn’t mean you now close all communication channels. It would be best if you were open to collaboration and assistance should the need arise. Therefore, keep all communication channels open and always urge your employees to feel free to communicate when necessary.
Proper communication will get things done faster with few delays and stumbling blocks. Communication enables people within your organization to collaborate more efficiently. Communication also enables formal feedback sessions: feedback that ensures everything is running smoothly and employees meet deadlines on time.
Ensure your employees can always reach you, even in emergencies. Be readily available to assist them in hitting their targets and getting you quality results.
5. The Power of Knowing: Understanding Each Team Member’s Strengths
The main element that makes delegation successful is identifying employees with the right skills and assigning them a job that aligns with their competencies. That way, they can deliver to the best of their strengths. It is, therefore, vital to know every employee and their varied competencies and likes.
Hand a project to an employee with the required skills, attitude, and extra motivation to do the job impeccably.
You should have an employee skills/talents database that will enable you to have this instrumental knowledge a button away to avoid time wastage. Doing this will enable employees to use their skills and offer them a chance to show their brilliance and earn praise.
6. Show Patience
As a manager, you may be more efficient at doing most things using the least time than your juniors, who may not be as efficient as you. However, it would be best not to let this turn you into a micro-manager who constantly pushes for quick turnovers at the expense of your junior’sjunior’s self-esteem.
It is, therefore, essential to show understanding and be patient with them. With time they will be able to attain your proficiency levels at delivering more things quicker. It would be best if you neither were arrogant nor pushy but instead showed understanding and compassion when employees cannot meet targets as required. Remember, this is a process, and they will take some time to be proficient, but through trust and persistence, they will hit the high levels of efficiency and productivity you desire.
7. The Power of Mistakes: Allowing Room for Failure and Growth
As a manager, it is easy always to demand only the best from your juniors and constantly ridicule and mock those who don’t meet the required threshold. However, take a step back and keenly analyze your path from junior to manager and identify any mistakes you made. Humans are prone to error, and as a leader, you, more than the rest, should acknowledge this critical aspect.
Mistakes are wrong if they do not provide you with a learning opportunity, and you, therefore, make the same mistake if the error does not give you the hunger and motivation to avoid failure in the future.
As a manager, you should always give room for failure among your juniors but let them always learn to be better in the future.
8. Practice How To Let Go of Duties
As a manager, you may have your way of doing things. However, it’s also essential if you recognize the competencies of your workforce and trust them to get the job done. You should not always feel bad when assigning your employees some duties.
Instead, be happy that they will offer a different perspective and dimension to the delivery of results. By so doing, you will be empowering your employees. You should, however, not wait until it’s too late to let go of duties and assign them to someone else.
Instead, plan for it well in advance to avoid last-minute rushes that will lead to undesirable results.
9. Focus On The Results
Proper people management calls for assigning duties to employees, empowering them to get the desired results, and, most importantly, giving them the time and space to work. Learn to step back from micro-managing people and let them do things their way. It may not be what you are used to or how you wish to conduct yourself, but it is advisable to do so to get the best out of your team.
Instead of always following up on employees, focus on the end product. Since, as a manager, you know what to expect, empower your juniors to get you what you want. Always being on people’s backs with follow-up questions can sometimes feel overly hectic to keep up with.
Giving your juniors space and time to work also enables you to get things done differently than you are used to. Focusing on results offers a different perspective on how to do things.
10. Acknowledging Excellence: Recognizing the Contributors Behind the Results
Delegation isn’t just about reassigning tasks; the process can end once the desired results are achieved. The final and most crucial part is to recognize, appreciate and celebrate the success of the team or specific person who got the job done.
Employees thrive in workplaces that appreciate them for the effort and skills that they add to the workplace. It should therefore be in order if you constantly endeavor to appreciate your teams and people for the work they put in at work. Let them take the spotlight and receive plaudits from their colleagues or teams.
Doing this will motivate other people who will always try as much as possible to produce high-quality results on time.
What Are The Benefits of Delegation?
You may be wondering why delegation is important and if it’s something that you should initiate in your company/workplace. As the manager, you should understand that you are working with teams with varied skills and strengths. Why not tap into these for maximum results, increased output quality, and improved turnover time?
One of the benefits of delegating tasks is that you save yourself from exhaustion and, eventually, burnout. It would be best not to carry all the burden. Instead, spread responsibilities and let other people within your organization help you. You will do much more this way and use less time.
On top of that, by delegating tasks, you empower your team(s) and enable them to showcase their skills while at the same time learning new things and growing career-wise.
What Hinders Managers From Delegating Tasks?
It is essential to note that delegating is difficult, especially if you are a first-time manager. Building and perfecting this critical skill and perfecting it takes time to a point where it feels automatic. Before you refine it, you will undergo a process of experimentation and doubt, but through persistence, you will be perfect at delegating.
Here are some of the reasons why you will probably be awful at delegation on your first attempt(s):
- Time: At first, you will probably feel the entire delegation process may take too much time than just leaving things as they are. It is fitting since you are a beginner. As such, you are yet to perfect a system that will ensure prompt reporting, analyzing, delegating, and turnover of results. It would be best if you did not let this make you give up.
- Unclear Priorities: At your first attempt, you will likely need help understanding which duties or tasks should have a higher priority and delegate them much quicker. Instead, you may delegate tasks that you should not delegate at that time. Eventually, you will become confused and need more consistency regarding what needs to go out first to improve your productivity.
- Center of attraction: It is easy to want to feel more important than the other employees/team members. You may also want to get recognition as the best manager or employee at your place of work. As such, you do not release specific vital tasks to others since you want to take all the credit and recognition.
You may get away with this for some time, but eventually, you will crumble under the weight of carrying too much weight. Learn to share responsibilities and share the spotlight with other people.
- Not knowing whom to delegate to: At times, especially when you are yet to know all your team members along with their varied competencies, you may not know who will perform the duties to perfection. As such, you will end up with employees who aren’t utilizing their skills to the maximum, and also, individually, you will end up with a long list of to-dos. Therefore, please get to know your employees and what they are capable of so that you know who can do what when delegating.
- Guilt: Having and showing empathy as a manager is not wrong. Empathy makes you a better leader. However, do not let that stand in the way of getting work done correctly. In other words, when assigning someone extra duties, do not feel it’s as if you are overburdening them with more work. Instead, first, establish whether they are capable of doing the job. Let them do the job if they have the required skills and available time.
- Being Choosy: Some managers sometimes pick the best and most enjoyable tasks for themselves and hand out the less desirable ones to their teams. This should not be the case as a manager needs to distribute work equally across the team, and everyone should get tasks they enjoy. It will increase their satisfaction and overall happiness at work.
- Lack of confidence and trust in employees: Some managers may need help to trust their employees to deliver desirable results on time. As such, they may give up on delegating responsibilities to their employees. However, this should not be the case. Instead, managers should always trust their employees with small responsibilities and build up to trusting them with big ones. In other words, it is up to the manager to teach their employees how to execute tasks flawlessly.
So, now that you know what is hampering you from initiating a delegation protocol in place, let’s look at it.
When Is The Right Time To Delegate?
These are essential questions you should ask yourself before deciding when and what to delegate.
- Are the priorities of another team member more in line with this work so you can assign them to them?
- Do I have enough time to adequately assign this task, train the recipient, respond to their inquiries, and evaluate their work?
- Will this project be repeated in the future?
- Can someone else learn and advance their abilities through this work?
- Does anyone else have the knowledge and background to complete this task?
- If necessary, do we have enough time to redo the work?
- Would failure affect the project’sproject’s success?
- Is this something I should work on personally (since it’s essential to the business or has a significant impact)?
The main idea is not to ensure you have concise answers to all these questions. Instead, the idea is to give you the correct information to assess the impact delegating will have on your work.
Now that you have more information on delegation let’s look at some tips to improve delegation’s effectiveness within your organization.
Delegate To Get More Done Efficiently
If you are yet to try delegating, by the end of reading this article, you will have more information about how to delegate work efficiently. Do not be afraid of changing things at your workplace or business to improve overall productivity and ensure company goals are always on track to be met promptly. Remember, you won’t be perfect at delegation overnight. Therefore, give it time; through persistence, one day, you will be a top manager and leader capable of getting work done efficiently through proper delegation and team involvement.
Frequently Asked Questions About Tips On How To Delegate Properly
What is the key to good delegation?
Maintaining a constant emphasis on accomplishing outcomes is the best method to develop high-performance employees for your company. Employees will be happier and more motivated if they can achieve more concrete, quantifiable achievements at work. They’ll experience winning.
What are the 4 Cs of delegation?
Clear, Concise (description of the task), Complete (including its intentions), and Correct (including limits & expectations).
What are the three keys to delegation?
Make sure expectations, authority, and accountability are crystal clear if you want to increase delegation’s success (regardless of whether you are the one delegating or receiving it).