Topic of the week: Delegation

Hello and welcome back

So this week I want to take you through Delegation as this a highly useful leadership skill that will help you with many things including time, team spirit, backups, skills development etc etc.

Before we get going, you have to have some trust in your team, focus on the brightest stars of the team, find the people who understand you to start with to speed up the process of trust.

I hear you say, "I don't have time to sit and delegate a task with the training to someone" - MAKE TIME! and you will be rewarded and helped a lot, and guess what? You will free up more time in the long term, but it will take some short term patience.

How to do it? -

• Whilst you are performing the task get one of your team members to come and sit with you and watch can be as easy as the training needs to be.  
• Make them take notes as they observe.  
• Give them the task next time and let them experiment and make mistakes as part of the learning experience.  You might be surprised... they might find a better or simpler way of the task you hadn't considered and help you both.  
• Don't kill the person if they take a little longer or make a mistake, be calm and encouraging.  say well done and that you highly appreciated their time and inputs, make them feel comfortable with helping you with tasks. Why? Because they might just come back and ask to help you with other things because you just became approachable at the same moment!

Successful steps to making this work:

• Explain the task and give it a start and end, don't leave your employee to guess the structure at least on the first attempt.  more on criteria of defining delectable tasks later
• choice the individual that should get something out of this, they show the most potential, have aptitude towards the skill set needed (attention to detail if its a spreadsheet, creativity if the normal solutions don't fit etc.), think about developing reliable potential for backup and time saving in the future.  dont split all your tasks to one person in your team only to avoid overload and favoritism
• is training needed, externally and internally and make some time for that if yes, it will reward you back in the future repeatedly.
• explain the importance or end result, so the employee knows what they are trying to achieve and also that gives them the aim of a desired outcome to know if they progressed correctly.
• make sure you give it a specific timeline for completion.  This is highly important otherwise it wont get don't when you want or need it.
• support the employee and communicate your thanks at the end and provide a feedback on the result if you will need to re-do the task repeatedly then its key they learn from their mistakes and get asked for their inputs on what could be improved. This might surprise you they come with different ideas and is always rewarding.

On the next update we will go through examples of what to delegate, a sort of short guide to what is appropriate, because you need to remain within your leading role and not allowing the employees onto something that is sensitive or confidential to other members of the team and departments...

Enjoy your day and see you soon !