I know, D should have been for December!  Don’t you think it seems to be upon us before we’ve had time to enjoy the rest of the year?  So much to do and so little time … well that’s why I’ve decided to focus this month’s newsletter on delegation.  If you’re anything like me, you still have a list of tasks as long as your arm to complete, but it’s recognising who are the people who can and who would like to help you get them completed to a high standard.  It’s only this year that I’ve started to share the work and the results have been so much better than I could have imagined.

‘No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit’ – Andrew Carnegie

I often regarded delegation as being a bit Teflon – you know – pushing work onto others to do rather than getting on and doing it yourself.  However, I’ve come to realise that when work is delegated properly it can have some very positive impacts.  Initially it frees you up to get on with the work that requires your full attention and secondly it expands your team members knowledge and skills set.  This helps us to not only build strength and resilience in ourselves and our people, but also the organisation.  When we are continually develop and and stretching ourselves we work to our optimum levels.  When we start to do work that isn’t challenging or people in our team are capable of carrying it out with our support, we start to shrink the organisation rather than expand it.  If you’re carrying out work that your team could do, you can bet your bottom dollar that your team are also carrying out work that their teams could do too!

To delegate effectively and ensure that you are getting the right results you need to remember some key pointers so that your team don’t feel that you are dumping additional work on them.  Delegation is not an abdication of responsibility for the task.  It is a conscious decision by you to recognise the ability of a particular member of your team who you feel will be able to deliver a piece of work to the standard you expect.  This means that they own the piece of work, make decisions to achieve the results and are therefore empowered to use their own judgement.  Your role is to provide the necessary support to ensure the individual is successful, by having regular updates.

So why do we often get delegation so wrong?  Sometimes it’s because we’re firefighting and we think it’s easier to do the job ourselves, after all it takes so long to explain the task, you’d have had it nearly completed by the time you’ve explained what needs to happen.  It may be that you’re a bit of a control freak and think you can do the task better yourself as if it goes wrong you’re still accountable for it anyway.  I’ve also experienced the opposite where some leaders are concerned that someone else in their team may do the job better than them!

During the year, I have been working with a number of teams and whenever we come to the subject of delegation, it’s been surprising to see that they often only think about one element of delegation and that is whether the person possesses the expertise.  Of course this is really important.  You need to know whether the person has the right skills and knowledge and understands what is required of them.  But it’s equally important to understand whether the person has the ‘will’ to do the task.  That is, does the person want to learn how to do the task?  Are they prepared to accept responsibility for the result and do they have the confidence?  When we focus on only one element, we are setting ourselves up to fail and it’s often for these reasons that we create the barriers to delegating effectively.

The key to good delegation is being able to judge when the team member is ready to take more ownership of the task.  You will only have succeeded when you have enabled someone to operate in a way that they take full charge of the piece of work.

Recognise that mistakes will happen, but it’s the way you manage them that counts!  Deal with them in a way that you can learn from them, but above all take accountability for the failure.  One of the biggest reasons that delegation fails is that the delegator doesn’t stay in contact with their team member to check on progress.  Don’t let this happen to you.  Find opportunities to check in regularly – not in the corridor, but structured reviews.  This stops there being any unexpected surprises at the end of the period!