Quick and Effective Delegation for Busy Leaders
Delegation is defined as “The act or process of authorizing subordinates to make certain decisions.” If you’ve been in any kind of leadership position before, you’ve bumped into how important it is to delegate and how overwhelmed you can get when you don’t.
Learning to delegate can be one of the most significant factors in how much time leaders have to focus on strategic initiatives, the growth and development of their people, and devoting crucial time to emerging crises. In contrast, leaders who struggle with delegation seem to always wind up with too little time for their people, leave too many unanswered requests, and cause bottlenecks with important information flow.
Worse still, leaders who delegate poorly resent their subordinates and colleagues.
Wait, do leaders who fail to delegate well really start to resent people? Yes, they do. When leaders don’t delegate, they feel that the weight of everything rests on their shoulders and see everyone else at work living what appears to be a stress-free life. Further, when leaders delegate poorly, they feel like they have to clean up a mess and can no longer trust the people around them to do a good job.
After all, you’ve heard the saying, “If you want it done right, do it yourself.”
Let’s then discuss how to delegate better, starting with when to delegate.
When to Delegate
It is helpful to think about delegation in terms of risk. Risk, in this case, is just considering what could go wrong. You need to be honest about your threshold for risk when you delegate, and may have a very low tolerance for risk at first. That doesn’t mean delegation isn’t suitable, though. It simply means your concern about what could go wrong prevents you from learning to delegate more.
So, let’s dig into risk a little more. Consider a routine meeting that is something like a status report. If we think about risk in terms of what can go wrong and what you’ll have to do to fix it, most of the time, the risk is limited to simple and easy-to-resolve communication issues. Delegation is generally low-risk since dealing with communication is usually quick and easy.
How about a meeting with information security or legal? Well, the risk suddenly goes up here. Working with these two groups is essential for releasing technology safely for everyone. The issues at play require cross-team work, privileged context, and a certain level of authority. It may sound like these are the types of meetings you cannot delegate, but you can. When you finish reading this article, think through how you’d successfully delegate in this situation. Pay attention to what you need to do to equip someone to handle the risks and what concerns still remain.
Another scenario might be a major outage. Outages are an interesting example because they are already delegated even though they are the definition of high-risk. This situation is often pre-delegated because of the clarity around roles, responsibilities, and operations. In other words, the organization as a whole equipped itself for this scenario.
What about a meeting with your peers? Risk can take the form of political capital within a company. Know when you should spend your time elsewhere and delegate, but be aware of the potential loss of that capital. Can you be successful if your peers see you as someone who thinks it isn’t worth their time to meet? Again, you can delegate these meetings once you know the risk and plan accordingly.
As you start delegating, you’ll want to stick to delegating what you perceive as low-risk and grow from there. Think through the hypothetical clean up that might have to occur if things go wrong. Preparation helps you take that crucial step of letting someone else take the lead.
How To Delegate
After you’ve established that you have a situation ready for you to stretch out those delegation muscles, you need to get ready. Don’t worry, though—this isn’t some crazy complicated scheme. Instead, you need to prepare how and what you will communicate as you delegate some task or responsibility.
I like to frame this information in the form of questions to answer. If you discuss these questions and answers when you delegate, your people will find success far more often.
- What specific outcome am I after?
- What decisions am I comfortable with them making?
- What decisions do I want them not to make?
- What information do I want them to communicate?
- What information do I want kept secret?
- What information do I want to have communicated to me?
- What would need to happen to signify that they bring me in?
- What constraints, like money, timing, staff, scope, etc, do I need them to operate within?
- What context do I need to give them to succeed?
This seems like a lot of questions, but you’ll find that not all of these apply to every type of delegation. For example, having someone go to a meeting for you that is primarily informative will only need about half of these questions answered. On the other hand, delegating the creation and execution of a plan will require almost all of these answers.
The bottom line about delegating successfully here is that people can succeed by providing them with the right information and guidance. Without this critical context, the person you delegate to must make uneducated guesses, which almost always invites preventable mistakes, miscommunication, and setbacks.
Now, delegation doesn’t just happen the moment you delegate to someone. It continues until the activity is complete. Close out the experience by hearing feedback from the person you delegated to regarding how equipped they felt and if they were happy with the outcome. Seek feedback on how you approached delegating to them and what you could have done to make them more successful. Different people in your group will have slightly different needs, and the better you can accommodate them, the more freedom you have in delegating.
Try This
Alright, so here is your delegation homework. Even if you feel you know how to delegate well, you likely haven’t used these questions before. So here’s what you do to strengthen your delegation muscles.
Start by delegating meetings. Focus on informational meetings and delegate them to someone else. Use the questions above to equip them to stand in for you, represent things faithfully, and report them to you accurately.
From here, you can delegate meetings that are less informational and require some decision-making. You will need to focus more on defining your outcomes, boundaries, and information.
Next, we can delegate even more areas of responsibility, like entire projects and activities related to their planning, release, and maintenance. You don’t have to do all this at once as you step into this type of delegation. Delegate what you can and intervene in the other areas until you can attempt more delegation.
After each delegation attempt, follow up and seek the feedback I mentioned above. This is how you’ll determine whether you’re growing your delegation capability and what areas you still need to work on.
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