Delegation is a critical skill for all managers and essential for effective time management but often delegation is poorly executed, frustrating both the person delegating and the person being delegated to. Delegation should neither be task allocation nor dumping. There should be a benefit for both parties but so often one or both parties feel dissatisfied.
The standard approach to delegation is as follows:
- Define. You need to know exactly what you are going to delegate. Don't be vague.
- Plan. Write down how you will present this task. List potential concerns and objections
- Select. Which of your team has the best skills to deliver the results. Don't be too fussy here. People need the opportunity to demonstrate their skills.
- Explain. Tell the employee why the work is important and why they are right for it.
- Define success. Be clear about what success looks like, if possible with a measurable target.
- Set limits. Let them know what they are accountable for and where they can get help.
- Invite doubt. Many employees start excited when delegated to but then feel that expressing doubt about the project or their ability is a sign of weakness. Encourage them to ask questions and assess the project on their own terms.
- Offer back-fill. Most jobs these days do not have low work-loads. When delegating you should also look at what routine or non-critical tasks your team member could ignore or delegate down themselves.
- Get commitment. Don't expect immediate agreement. Give them time to think it over. Never rush this stage.
- Give commitment. Make sure they feel confident about coming to you should they face any hurdles. Be sure to show you have full confidence in their ability to complete the project.
- Agree. Set milestones and time lines and how you will monitor progress. Get them to suggest as much of this as possible.
- Recognize and reward. Successful completion of a delegated project or task should mean something. Be clear from the outset how much value you place on it and reflect that in the reward you offer.
- List your projects or tasks. Never delegate part of a project or piece of work. This avoids the accusation of dumping the dull parts of a project while keeping the best bits for yourself.
- Estimate time required. Calculate the number of hours you would expect each project or task to take.
- Estimate the cost. Work out the hourly cost of yourself and your team members.
- Map into a table. It should now be possible to work out the cost of each project or task depending on who is delivering it. This should show you clearly the difference in cost if you complete a project or if a member of your team does. Three groups should emerge: high, medium and low cost.
- Estimate Return On Investment (ROI). Once you understand the cost groups, then you need to know the value of that project to your organization. For each project and task set a high, medium and low ROI.
- Select projects for delegation. You can now put together your cost group with your ROI group. Low cost and low ROI go together, medium cost and medium ROI go together and so on.
This technique allows you to delegate the right projects to the right team member based on simple cost and ROI analysis. You can of course bend the rules as you see fit but at least in this way there is some logic to what you choose to delegate. Remember delegation is also about developing the team member so giving them a project which is in the group above (for example a high ROI project to a medium cost member of staff) is good practice.
How do you delegate? What approach do you use?