131: [Solo] How to Delegate Right and Reduce Your Stress on the TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay

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ep131 how to delegate right and reduce your stress TalentGrow Show with Halelly Azulay

Effective delegation is an essential supervisory skill. Any leader who supervises the work of others must learn to delegate effectively in order to accomplish his or her goals. As you move into a leadership role you must remove some of the work you previously accomplished on your own in order to make time for performance management and leadership tasks.

Effective delegation is an essential supervisory skill. Any leader who supervises the work of others must learn to delegate effectively in order to accomplish his or her goals. As you move into a leadership role you must remove some of the work you previously accomplished on your own in order to make time for performance management and leadership tasks. And because that work still must be completed, you will need to delegate it to your staff.

On this solo episode of the TalentGrow Show, I summarize the barriers and benefits of delegating and describe a step-by-step process to help you delegate successfully, reduce your stress, grow your talent, and create better teams. Take a listen, weigh in with your own opinion, and share with others!

Effective delegation is an essential supervisory skill. Any supervisor or manager must learn to delegate effectively in order to accomplish his or her goals. By definition, to supervise the work of others means that you have to take time away from the technical aspects of your job and tend to the people side of things. Therefore, because time resources are finite, you must remove some of the work you were previously able to accomplish on your own from your task-list in order to make time for performance management and leadership tasks. And because that work still must be completed, you will need to delegate it to your staff.

In this episode (which is based on this popular blog post), I summarize the barriers and benefits of delegating, and offer a step-by-step process to help you delegate successfully.

What is delegation?

Delegation involves assigning responsibility to another person for a task for which you are still ultimately accountable. At the core of delegation are the opposite concepts of autonomy and control. How much autonomy the delegate has to decide how to complete the task is negatively correlated with how much direct influence you choose to exercise over how the delegate will do the work.

There is a broad spectrum of possible combinations and the right one is dependent on contextual issues such as the task, the time available, and the experience level and/or fitness of the delegate to perform the task. The difference between delegating, micromanaging, and dumping lies in the results of that decision matrix.

Barriers to delegating

Inevitably, leaders and managers tell me about the myriad barriers they see when they think about delegating. Here are some of their challenges – see if they ring a bell for you:

  • I don’t have time to train someone else to do it; it’s faster to just do it myself…

  • I’m not sure I can trust someone new with this task…

  • I don’t feel right asking others to do ‘my’ work…

  • I worry people on my team don’t have the right skills to do this task…

  • What if the person I delegate to feels this is too [boring, easy, hard] for them…

  • What if they do it wrong and I have to re-do it anyway?...

Well, here’s the reality:

First, unless you give people a chance to learn a task and earn your trust, you’ll be overloaded and overwhelmed forever – nothing will change. How’s your current workload working for ya?

Also, while it requires an up-front investment of time, developing your staff will pay back dividends.
You have to have a long-view mentality on delegation.

You do want to ensure you don’t just ‘dump’ boring or mundane tasks on folks who can handle more challenging and satisfying work – try to delegate a process or project whenever you can to give them the satisfaction of seeing something full-circle.

[Here’s that funny I Love Lucy clip I mentioned.]

Benefits of delegating

There are lots of benefits that delegating well can yield. Some of them include:

  • Develops new competencies and skills in your staff, which helps them feel more satisfied in their job and feel more engaged (translation: they’ll be less likely to bail)

  • Develops more self-sufficiency and autonomy in your staff over time, which helps them feel good and relieves you of having to spend as much time providing support and input

  • Builds trust between you and your staff (it goes both ways)

  • Allows your staff to have a wider variety of experiences and makes them more well-rounded and satisfied

  • Improves service to clients – more qualified employees and faster/more efficient processes are possible when you share the work and remove the backlog

  • You become less overwhelmed and can feel less overworked (imagine that!)

Sound good? Are you ready to get started? Good, but first, some cautionary words.

Some tasks should NOT be delegated

Before you get all delegation-happy, beware: it’s not always appropriate to delegate. There are some things that you should keep on your to-do list. 

For example, you shouldn’t delegate performance conversations or giving feedback. It’s your job to manage performance and you’re the only one who should do it.

Also, you should never delegate firing an employee (although Human Resources professionals will tell you plenty of managers try to…).

And managing a change process is also something that you should not delegate. You can delegate some aspects of the change management process, but the overall leadership of the change must stay with you.

What are other tasks, activities, or processes you shouldn’t delegate? Chime-in in the comments below!

The process of delegation

Now that we’re clear on the barriers and benefits of delegating and also what should not be delegated in the first place, here’s a five step process that can help you delegate effectively.

1.    Analyze your time and tasks. Take a close look at your time and the tasks on your to-do list. Break them down into the smallest chunks, but also keep them connected to the bigger project of which they’re a part. Choose the tasks that you can and should delegate and those that you should keep. Consider grouping them to give that deeper meaning and satisfaction of seeing a process rather than just a tiny, boring, meaningless task.

2.    Choose a delegate. What factors affect how you select a delegate? Think about their current skill level as well as their desired skill development, their current workload, and the distribution of delegated tasks among your staff. Take a big picture view before zeroing in on who will be the best person for the job.

Caution: Be extra aware of any tendency you may have to go to the ‘rock stars’ again and again: you’re not only burning them out, you’re inadvertently missing the opportunity to develop others and possibly causing them to get disappointed and disengaged.

[Here are my blog, vlog, and podcast about the 10 conversations every leader should have with every employee on an ongoing basis which I mentioned – and which will help you KNOW what their desired skill development is. And here’s that blog post about the difference between delegating, micromanaging, and dumping I mentioned previously.]

3.    Brief the delegate about the task and your expectations. Tell them both the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of the delegated task. Here are some of the important points to cover:

  • Define the objectives clearly and concisely (create a checklist)

  • Specify resources available (human, financial, equipment, facilities)

  • Set a schedule with deadlines, milestones, review/check-in points

  • Describe the ‘how’: the methodology and procedures – allowing as much input as appropriate. Note: the more experienced they are with the work, the less you should specify the ‘how’ and the more autonomy you should allow them.

  • Specifically define levels of authority, decision-making range, and level of monitoring/autonomy (where on the Responsibility Ladder should they be? It’s described in this blog post.)

  • Ask the person to summarize the task in their own words (this is where you can catch any gaps between your vision and their understanding of it)

  • Get agreement and commitment

  • Offer support without removing responsibility
    Tip: No one likes being micromanaged but some tasks or some people could really benefit from more hands-on support. Assess the contextual factors I’ve described previously here and provide the right level of balance between autonomy and control.

4.    Monitor and encourage. Be sure to do this in accordance with the appropriate level of autonomy and control that were discussed between you. This should prevent any surprises and also help you ensure that you’re helpful but not crossing the line into being overbearing or the ‘dead-beat boss’, nowhere to be found. [Here’s a funny video I found that shows the wrong way to do it…]

5.    Evaluate, extract lessons-learned, and celebrate successes. This is a step that you should do for yourself as well as with the delegate. Get and give feedback, and keep developing the person up the Responsibility Ladder to take on more autonomy and to free you up from having to exert as much control.

I hope that now you feel more empowered to delegate more often and more effectively. Just think of all the opportunities you will be able to pursue when you reduce your stress and have more slack in your day!

YOUR TURN:

  • What’s your biggest A-ha or takeaway from this episode?

  • What other ideas do you have for why and how to delegate successfully?

  • Would you like to submit a question for a future “Ask Halelly” or solo episode? You can use the voice messaging widget right here on the website and then I can even play your audio (with your permission, of course) on the episode! Or you can send me an email, or a ‘contact us’ form on this site, or a comment-based question, or a tweet…. You get the picture. Anyway you like it, I would love to hear your question!

About Halelly Azulay (that’s me!)

Have we met? I'm Halelly Azulay. I'm an author, speaker, facilitator, and leadership development strategist and an expert in leadership, communication skills, and emotional intelligence. I am the author of two books, Employee Development on a Shoestring (ATD Press) and Strength to Strength: How Working from Your Strengths Can Help You Lead a More Fulfilling Life. My books, workshops and retreats build on my 20+ years of professional experience in communication and leadership development in corporate, government, nonprofit and academic organizations.

I am the president of TalentGrow LLC, a consulting company focused on developing leaders and teams, especially for enterprises experiencing explosive growth or expansion. TalentGrow specializes in people leadership skills, which include communication skills, teambuilding, coaching and emotional intelligence. TalentGrow works with all organizational levels, including C-level leaders, frontline managers, and individual contributors.

People hire me to speak at conferences and meetings and to facilitate leadership workshops, but what I love most is to help fast growing organizations create a leadership development strategy and approach.

I'm a contributing author to numerous books, articles and blogs. I was described as a “Leadership Development Guru” by TD Magazine. I blog, publish a leadership podcast (um, hello?!), and have a popular free weekly subscription newsletter – so you should definitely sign up at www.tinyurl.com/talentgrow.

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Intro/outro music: "Why-Y" by Esta