Learn the best practices for delegating tasks to your team effectively and empowering your team members to achieve success.
No matter what effective management manuals say, delegation is difficult! It seems that it is faster to do everything yourself than to explain the task to someone else and then correct the mistakes. But sooner or later, everyone faces a situation when time and energy run out and it becomes impossible to carry everything on your own. And this is true both for work and for personal life.
Step 1: Select tasks to delegate
Routine tasks. These are small, simple tasks that you have to do regularly. For example, planning business trips and meetings, preparing information materials for clients, maintaining a corporate website and social networks. You can do all of this quickly and efficiently yourself. But these tasks take up all of your time and prevent you from doing what is really important. If you delegate them, you will free up your resources and bring more benefit to the company.
Tasks for which there is a lack of competence. You can design an advertising brochure yourself or set up a messenger bot to receive requests from clients. But if you have never done this before, you will have to figure it out from scratch. You will waste time, and the result will be worse than if you turned to professionals. It is more effective to order such services from a third party or hire an employee who is a specialist in the required field.
Urgent matters. When a project is burning and you physically cannot finish everything on time, you need to ask for help. By properly distributing tasks within the team, you are more likely to finish everything on time.
Non-urgent tasks. Important tasks that are not tied to a specific date are a good opportunity to train an employee without rushing. You will have time to carefully discuss the project and correct mistakes. Your colleague will have the opportunity to understand a new direction without stress. In the future, he will be able to pick up urgent tasks when necessary.
Step 2. Find performers
The right choice of performers is half the success of delegation. It is important that the employee can demonstrate his strengths. For example, to organize a corporate event, you need to communicate with a large number of contractors. For this task, it is important to choose a person who is ready to talk a lot and seek compromises. And to work with databases, you need an attentive and meticulous employee.
Whenever possible, new tasks should help employees develop and grow. For example, loading highly qualified specialists with simple routine is not the best idea. This way, you will fill their time with simple tasks, and they will not be able to fully apply their experience for the benefit of the company.
Step 3: Hand over tasks gradually
Often people are afraid to delegate tasks because they have already had a negative experience: they spent time explaining, and then had to redo everything. Here you need to take into account that training employees takes time. For example, if you hired a personal assistant for the first time, you will hardly be able to hand over all the work to him in one day. Start with small tasks: assign him to organize a business lunch or the next business trip. This will make it easier for both you and the assistant. He will gradually master new responsibilities, and you will learn to trust the other person and not worry about the result.
Step 4: Formulate the problem and make sure it is understood correctly
In order for a person to complete a task as well as you do, they need to be brought up to speed. For example, you decided to hire an employee to manage social networks. They need to understand what has already been done, what image of the company you are striving for, what results you expect, what promotion tools you approve of, and which you consider unacceptable.
It is better to record tasks in writing so that the employee can return to the notes and clarify important points. For standard tasks, you can create instructions.
After you’ve explained the task, ask the employee to tell you what they plan to do and where they’ll start. Ask how much time they’ll need and whether they think the deadlines are realistic. Ask if they have enough resources to complete the task. This will help ensure that you’ve understood each other correctly and that your expectations are aligned.
Step 5. Transfer not only responsibilities, but also rights
Remember that you are assigning a task, not a method for achieving it. Don’t micromanage and let your employees decide for themselves how exactly they will increase sales by 10% or organize a corporate party to celebrate the company’s fifth anniversary.
It is not for nothing that you hired competent specialists who understand their fields better than you. Give them the opportunity to prove themselves. To do this, they should have not only duties, but also rights, that is, the ability to make decisions within their area of responsibility.
Step 6. Monitor intermediate stages
No matter who is doing the task, you are responsible for the end result. You will have to close loose ends, correct mistakes, and quickly finish the project if the employee missed the deadline. To avoid such a situation, control the task execution process.
The degree of control depends on the employee’s experience. A newcomer can be helped to draw up an action plan and asked to report at each stage. For a more experienced employee, it is enough to assign several checkpoints. A proven person who has been working in the company for a long time can come to you with a completed task and a ready result.
In order not to irritate employees with excessive control, you can use task tracking programs. They may differ in details, but they work on the same principle. For each task, a card is created with a designated deadline. Having moved one step closer to the goal, the employee changes the task status. This way, the manager sees what stage the matter is at the moment.