The power of delegation
The most common issue that business leaders suffer from these days is an apparent ‘lack of time’.
Besides identifying what’s urgent vs what’s important, effective prioritisation and good planning, another approach that can get overlooked in amongst all the busyness is delegation.
Remarkable really since this action is essential to business growth (not to mention the business leader’s health and well-being) yet is deployed far less frequently than it should be with the result that business leaders get burnt out and staff feel like they receive the crumbs from the table. So why does it not happen as frequently as it should?
Two key reasons for this are: not thinking that you have the time to delegate and secondly there may well be a belief that ‘if you want something done properly, you have to do it yourself’. However those leaders that think like this were not born with that skill, they had to learn it themselves and in that learning they would undoubtedly have made mistakes. It is easy to forget this once we become ‘unconsciously competent’ in a particular discipline and so others’ mistakes may seem stupid by comparison.
Robert Heller in his book ‘How to Delegate’ notes that
“Delegation involves entrusting another person with a task for which the delegator remains ultimately responsible.”
and so for technically capable leaders, trusting someone else with a task for which you still remain ‘ultimately responsible’ may be a hard thing to do. This is always a risk and of course this highlights the need to select the person to whom you delegate very carefully, however there are so many additional benefits of delegation that this is very often a risk worth taking. Here are just a few additional benefits of delegating effectively:
Workload is shared and so the load on the delegator is eased allowing them to focus on other key things which cannot be delegated and are potentially being given insufficient attention
Opportunity to grow the skills and enhance job satisfaction of the person being delegated to. Results from recent Gallup surveys in both the US and Australia consistently show that around 70% of staff are disengaged and a further 15% are ‘actively disengaged’ (working against the best interests of the company). I believe that this stems at least partly from a lack of well-defined responsibility and ownership which would undoubtedly improve with greater levels of delegation.
More cost-effective way of getting things done - the delegator’s hourly rate will almost certainly be more than the person to whom they are delegating
Opportunity for less senior staff to get exposure to more senior tasks
There is a general rule of thumb in business that states ‘if someone in the team can do something 70% as well as you can, then they should probably be doing it’. This may be tough to do for some business leaders who may take pride in describing themselves as ‘perfectionists’ but as noted in a previous article, there is no room for perfection in business, an 80/20 approach will yield far greater benefits.
The last thing to note on delegation is that it should not be undertaken for the purposes of ‘off-loading’. For this reason it is important that there is real clarity about the outcome(s) expected from the delegated task and that the person being delegated to understands what is expected, is happy to take it on and prepared to commit to getting the result.
Ian Ash ACC, AInstIB
Managing Director OrgMent Talent Solutions