Topic of the week: Delegation

So welcome back to this week's topic on Delegation!

So now you had a look around on the idea what to delegate, how to introduce it and use it for your employees I would like to take that all and wrap it in a package which looks enticing even for the employee to regularly help you in your leadership role and feel like they are benefiting and progressing as much as you are.

So I will start with examples of what to avoid and then progress to more and more positive outputs for both the leader and the employee:

• Follow these instructions precisely or do exactly what I say - there is no thought or freedom here only instruction 

• Ask them for options and then tell them you will decide which is the best - your missing their recommendation and maybe this is the most valuable input as they might combine or think about the options differently that a document list. 

• Take a look at this and we will sit together and decide together how to proceed - this is more coaching and development but encourages decision making from analysis 

• Take a look on this and decide on the outcome and I will approve it for implementation - this is normally a stage where a level of trust has been built and the employee has experience in being delegated similar tasks - we want to get here ! 

• This is your task, try and figure it out and let me know what you did - we can even go one step more and ask them not to inform you of the outcome, basically the level of trust here is good enough that they will basically add your authority to the situation and provide an outcome on your behalf one off. 

• The final level is to say that this is permanently your task from now on, take control of it and shape it the way that works best - basically if the employee owns it, even their mistakes are theirs to learn and grow and develop from. this is the highest level especially if we talk about multiple tasks, it give the employee confidence, skills and most importantly progress, if for instance you also have another role opening up it's as if they are already working themselves towards it in a constructive way 

There needs to be practice both from the employee and employer of regularly delegation to work towards the final steps, like a career plan, you don't start with the end result and work backwards the levels of trust normally.


So the advice here is practice, practice, practice ! :o) make yourself comfortable with this with different staff members, this will help develop your verbal approach to them and also at the same time give you feedback about each member's competencies and working styles to complement your own or contrast to yours in a positive way (like a technical person and an ideas generator together can provide great fruits).

Remember the best approach is to treat any mistakes as a learning curve not a way to get punish, otherwise no one will want to assist regularly and you will make it hard for your team to ever progress unless they are completely stubborn and try and prove you are wrong in a bad way to show you are not the leader of the team, they have something ahead of you.

I hope this has helped provoke some thoughts and you want to leave feedback !

Tune in tomorrow for more of the same !

See you soon