As a manager, do you feel entitled to delegate tasks to "less-important" people? How does it feel when your own manager asks you to do something that you feel is a waste of time? Or when your manager asks you to do something that you know would take them 10 minutes but will take you an hour?
The point is not that delegation is bad, but that delegation is like any tool: it can be used efficiently or inefficiently. If it becomes a way for a manager (whether you or your own manager) to just shift pain to someone more vulnerable than they, like a report, it becomes destructive. There is a difference between delegating work to the right person who should own it, and delegating work to someone else because you don't want to do it or think that you're too busy (who isn't busy?) Delegation gone wrong wastes your and your people's time and sends a message to them that you don't respect their time.
As a manager, by just getting stuff done that you might have delegated for the wrong reasons in the past, you:
1) Save you the time of explaining, clarifying and following up,
2) Saves your team's time and increase their productivity, and
3) Boosts their morale by communicating to them through your actions that you respect their time
Be authentic about your delegation - who really is the best, not most convenient or most junior, person to handle it?
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1 comment:
I absolutely agree. I believe in "delegate for success" -- There is nothing more de-moralizing than making people do work that they can't see any value in.
If the task or project is worthless, it's the manager's responsibility to protect the team (and ultimately, the company) from wasting resources on it. Sometimes that means saying "no", and sometimes, it means sucking it up and just getting it over with.
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