Why do we find it difficult to delegate?

It is often one of the hardest things for a new manager to let go of a task and to trust someone else to do it. Let’s unpack the reasons why it is so difficult for many people to delegate before we get on to how to delegate effectively.

At the root of people’s reluctance to delegate lie three emotions of control, fear and trust and a practical element of time and efficiency:

·      They don’t trust the person to do the job they need doing.

·      They fear losing control of the process and output.

·      They fear the consequences of things going wrong, mistakes, or deadlines missed.

·      They fear it not being done in exactly the same way they would have done it!

The final element that puts people off delegating is time and efficiency. The view that it takes longer than doing it yourself by the time you have explained what you want and how do to it and therefore what’s the point.

If you are going to get the most out of people and maximise their potential, you need to let them get on with it.

·      Empower and support them to do their best, make decisions and deliver results.

·      Trust them to come to you when they need to and trust you will be there for them.

What We Will Cover:

·      Understand the capacity and capability of your team members.

·      Clearly define roles, responsibilities, objectives, and expectations

·      Practice Effective Delegation – What, Why, When, How

·      Get out of their way and Empower and Support them to own it.

·      Deliver the environment, culture and resources that Enables them to succeed.

·      Prioritise your workload so you can delegate the important non urgent stuff ahead of time.

Definitions

Effective Delegation is empowering, trusting, and enabling someone to take responsibility for the delivery of a task or project, with minimal supervision safe in the knowledge they have the capacity, capability and support needed to succeed.

Empowering means giving someone the responsibility to make decisions to deliver something with the necessary support, but it does not include a full transfer of accountability. You can make someone fully responsible, but you have to maintain shared accountability.

If you own this idea of joint accountability, you will delegate much more effectively because you are jointly accountable for the success or failure, and you will do all you can to fully enable them to succeed. Good feedback throughout the process is also an integral part of effective delegation.

The Critical Components

1.    Capacity and Capability

You need to be sure that the person has the capability and capacity, to be empowered with a specific task.

Capacity refers to an individual’s ability to absorb change or take on new tasks effectively. People can only take on a certain amount of new knowledge, tasks or change before they become overloaded, the consequences of which may include, underperformance, burnout, or anxiety.

·      Capacity is a finite resource. Think of it like a single bucket. Once it’s full you need to stop adding to it otherwise it will overflow. It is not divided between work and personal lives.

Build awareness of the capacity of your team and they should feel comfortable raising any issues around capacity, without fear of retribution in a psychologically safe environment.

You can help build capacity and support people who are at their limit by doing the following:

·      Providing more time, if possible, to complete a task.

·      Give additional resource or delegate tasks to someone else.

·      Providing a culture of support and psychological safety.

Capability refers to the skills and knowledge required for a particular task. A person may have the capacity to change but lack certain key capabilities. It is important to be aware of the capability of the person before delegating responsibility for a task.

A lot of experience and knowledge comes on the job, which is where ongoing coaching and mentoring support are a crucial ingredient to effective delegation and true empowerment. In many cases, building capability can expand their capacity.

2.     How You Delegate

Always be clear on:

1.      What it is you are delegating

2.      Why you need it doing.

3.      When it needs to be completed by

4.    How you want the work to be completed

WHAT needs to be as clear as possible and you need to allow for questions and challenge. Setting clear objectives is critical to good delegation. I use Lock and Latham’s 5 principles as a check list for determining an objective. The first three steps are how you set the objective and the last two steps are about how you help with its implementation and follow through.

The five principles are:

1. Complexity – break down into the least complex steps
2. Clarity – Clear, unambiguous, and precise
3. Challenge – the sweet spot of stretching but achievable.
4. Commitment – check and recheck commitment to goal.
5. Feedback – progress feedback and course correction

Applying these principles helps to ensure that the objective for the delegated task is something that can be achieved and measured, i.e., we’ll know when it’s done.

What about SMART objectives?

You can’t argue with the basic principles of SMART but over 30 years I have never been able to fit my objectives consistently and successfully into SMART, particularly broad-based strategic objectives, or long term multifaceted ones. I personally find it time consuming and inefficient attempting to crowbar objectives into it, so a set of principles work better for me.

The Why is critical to effective delegation. Motivation is driven by the why not the what. Explain why the task is going to help the team achieve its goals, why it matters and what the benefits are. People want to feel their effort is part of something bigger and want to understand how it fits into achieving the team or company goals.

Even mundane tasks need to be set in context, you may not be able to truly motivate and inspire with every task you delegate (let’s be real about it) but you can always explain how it helps you, the team, or the company.

Alternative examples of how you could delegate a relatively simple task:

“I need you to complete this spreadsheet for me every week to log the instances of invoice errors that we are experiencing. It’s important it gets done every week by Friday at 1 pm and sent to me for review and inclusion in my report. I appreciate your help on this one. Let me know if you have any questions.”

This is not bad. A lot of managers will be worse. But alternatively, you could explain the importance of this relatively simple and mundane task and the benefits it can help deliver.

“One of our team objectives this year is to reduce the number of invoice errors to improve our customer service and reduce costs within the business, it is part of the wider company initiative to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

To be able get on top of the issue we first need to know the scale of the problem and to be able to analyse the data to look for patterns, without this we won’t be able to achieve our objective this year so it’s really important we gather this data.

In order to help with this, I need you to complete this spreadsheet for me every week to log the instances of invoice error that we are experiencing. It’s important it gets done every week by Friday at 1 pm and sent to me for review and inclusion in my report. I’d value your input into the process and spreadsheet layout, as well as any insight you can glean from the data, which would be invaluable. Do you have any questions or suggestions at this point?”

When the work needs to be completed should be transparent and realistic, without ambiguity. We all know plans and timings change. Being honest and straight forward about timings is a key determining factor of the level of motivation of the person delegated to.

It is frustrating and demotivating when the person who delegates a task messes around with timing, the opposite of the feelings we want to inspire.

·      Don’t be the boss who pads lots of time into the deadline for themselves.

·      Don’t be fuzzy about deadlines and then all of a sudden the deadline is “missed”.

·      Some things are genuinely urgent, but don’t be the boss where everything is urgent.

So make sure to:

·      Always give a deadline even if you are relaxed about when you get something back.

·      People need to plan their work and you have to respect their time.

·      Be up front and honest about your timing. Trust your people to work with you on it.

·      Make sure you always acknowledge the work when it comes to you.

·      For urgent, and important work, give a clear deadline and explain why it’s urgent.

·      Plan your delegation so that you can avoid everything being urgent.

You should be creating a culture and relationships that enable your team members to ask you if the deadline is still the same, to suggest new deadlines based on their workload and to feel like they can communicate with you as needed.

How you want the work to be completed is critical. Remember the more you can provide clarity upfront the better things will go and the more trust you can have in the person you delegate to.

Beware the perfectionist and micro manager, this is not an invitation for you to tell people exactly how to do something! We want to empower people to do things their way, but we may have some requirements around the format, layout or specific regulations or professional guidelines. Now get out of the way!

3.     Empower

The person delegated to needs to own the task fully and have full responsibility for its delivery.

·      You have to feel comfortable letting go and letting them get on with it

·      You have to trust them to come to you when they need a question answered, additional resource, guidance, or support.

·      You have to trust in your effective delegation that they know what to do, why they are doing it and how to do it.

Responsibility is a duty to perform or complete a task. Accountability is an assurance that an individual will be held to account and be evaluated on the completion of their responsibilities.

You are still ultimately accountable for the work. Shared accountability is an important precept in delegation as your team member needs to feel they will not be hung out to dry! The assumption is that the person delegated to works with in the normal ethical boundaries and is transparent with you, flags mistakes or problems early and openly and is not knowingly negligent in anyway.

4.    Enabling

Importantly empowering people is not just handing things over without the support, training, resources, and guidance required. To properly empower you need to enable people to succeed by giving them the what they need. This includes knowledge, skills, and tools they need to be successful, including coaching, resources, guidance, and training.

It also includes creating the right culture with high levels of emotional safety and a growth mindset to ensure that people feel safe and secure in their ability to flag bad news early, highlight delays and mistakes and call out any practices that are hindering their progress.



If we enable people to take ownership in the knowledge of why they are doing their job and with clear expectations established in an environment of emotional safety, then you will get highly engaged motivated people giving their best and delivering results.