The idea behind delegation

One of my favourite leadership approaches for ensuring you have the right people in the right role is to delegate. When you delegate tasks to others, you not only identify their skill levels, confidence at attitude, you also develop and empower them. 

I wasn't always the best delegator.  I learned how to do it, and my beliefs about delegation changed as I did. I would distribute work to others, that is the role of a manager. However, the interesting, high profile, high stakes work, well sometimes I would hold on to that stuff. I learned that as I trusted others to deliver, they rose to the challenge and I could delegate more. I worked on more high value work, and everyone succeeded.  I remember not being able to attend a meeting. I thought I could prepare an update and hope someone would read it out for me. My Manager said, why do that when you can ask your team member to come along for you? Seriously, I hadn't even consider that. It was a Managers meeting, I was a Manager, I couldn't delegate that could I? I look back now and realise how limiting my beliefs were. Of course I could help prepare my team member for a senior meeting, and in doing so, it lightened my load and prepared them for their next career move.

We all have our own beliefs, attitudes and style when it comes to delegation.

Reflect on your attitude towards delegation and how it influences your approach to developing your people into their roles. Sometimes you have to instruct, other times you need to empower and trust them. 

Think about your role and discuss with your team: 

• When do you delegate? 
• When don’t you? 
• What makes it easy and what makes it challenging? 
• How does it make your team feel?
• What is your natural leadership style and how is it helping or hindering team development? 

Delegation simply means work sharing. You can't do everything and if you find yourself not delegating enough, you will not only level down yourself, but you prevent others from levelling up. Your job is to delegate and share tasks and activities to the right people. It means holding other accountable for the work they do and helping them to do their best work. You will still be responsible for getting the work done, but not accountable for it's delivery. 

Delegation makes business sense – you have people to perform tasks – so let them. Delegations frees you up to do the important stuff and helps them do better work.