“At the party of leadership skills, Delegation is the drably dressed, quiet guy sitting in the corner. Seems boring.

People talk to him when they have to. Just enough to be polite. And because he’s sitting next to the chips. Then off to find someone else more interesting.

However, on their way home, they receive this text: “OMG, OMG, OMG! That nerd guy! He’s a gazillionaire! He makes rockets or creates genes or buys and sells countries or something!

It turns out that Delegation only seems boring.

Actually, it turns out that Delegation is just Super Successful Leadership’s alter ego. His street disguise.

Delegation is what Super Successful Leadership looks like when he puts on glasses and covers up his tights.” – Excerpt from my book The Successful New CEO.

You Must Learn to Delegate

You won’t lead much if you don’t learn to delegate well.

There are a handful of common growth limiters for leaders and, by extension, organizations. A dominant one is being lousy at delegation.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Leadership is all about organizing the decisions and behaviors of others towards a common purpose or goal. The amount of “others” you can organize is directly tied to your ability to delegate.

You might be running a billion-dollar company – but if you don’t master delegation – you’ll oversee its decline and probably won’t know it until it is too late.

Or you might be running a start-up or mom & pop. You’ll never sustainably grow beyond what you personally can do or oversee unless you learn to delegate.

Sustained growth requires successful delegation.

What Is Delegated

Almost everything that needs to be delegated falls within three levels:

• Level 1 – Tasks: The most basic level. Many time-consuming tasks don’t require the leader’s direct attention. Task delegation is the easiest to start with and requires the least amount of leadership. It’ll help clear your plate. But on its own, it won’t help you build very much.

• Level 2 – Projects: Projects are discrete, usually time-based, and with defined outcomes. When you can hand a project off to someone, you are starting to create a platform that allows growth.

• Level 3 – Responsibilities: Delegating areas of responsibility is where the magic begins to happen. This might be a unit of business (managing a store) or a function (accounting) or a result (business development/sales). Each of these responsibilities can scale up or down.

Three Ways Leaders Sabotage Their Own Efforts to Delegate:

• Lack of clarity about expectations, future, or responsibilities: If leaders don’t know what they want, neither does anyone else. Don’t expect people to read your mind or know it better than you do.

The clearer your expectations are, the easier it is for others to meet them and for you to know if they’ve been met. The clearer the vision of the future is, and the map for getting there, the easier it is for you to deploy others to help create that future. The more clearly defined responsibilities are – the easier it is for others to meet them.

Only leaders can ensure that kind of clarity.

• Lack of trust – not defining metrics. Many leaders struggle with trusting others. This is often tied to the fear of being responsible for something you can’t see. The solution, often, is a good system of reporting and metrics.
• Poor accountability habits in the organization: Many organizations have built bad habits around accountability. Examples of poor habits include:
  • Not assigning tasks, projects, or responsibilities. Who is responsible? By when?
  • Not being clear on indicators of success/metrics.
  • Not planning and scheduling follow-up on progress.
  • Not addressing progress issues as they occur.

What if your only goal for the coming year was to improve in these three areas? Here’s what you’d see:  An increase in profitability, a reduction in conflict, and decreased stress and workload.

What would that mean for you?

It is that simple.

What Is Needed for Delegation to Work?

Assuming sufficient clarity around expectations and metrics, the employees you would delegate to need three things:

1. Authority: They need to know their decision-making power. What decisions are on or off the table? What resources (financial, personnel, equipment, etc. do they have access to and how?)
2. Skills: People’s skills need to match what you’ve asked them to do. Where they don’t, we need to decide what adjustments need to be made. Delegate to someone else? Get them help? Train them? Give them more time to learn on the job? Etc.
3. Knowledge: People need sufficient contextual knowledge. If you need someone to buy new computers for the office – it helps to ask someone who knows about computers, what the computers will be required to do, the working environment they’ll be in, what systems they need to be compatible with, etc.

How to Troubleshoot Delegation Problems

Most employees are motivated and want to do good work. But sometimes problems happen.  Begin by looking at yourself and the management structure first:

• Have I/we been clear:
  • Do we have well-defined outcomes?
  • Were timeframe expectations clear?
  • Was it clear who was responsible?

• Does the person I/we delegated to have sufficient:
  • Authority?
  • Skills?
  • Knowledge?

• Do we have effective accountability habits and structures in place?
  • Do we schedule regular check-ins?
  • Do we have structured, planned reporting?
  • Are there clear metrics?

As you work to be able to answer each of these questions affirmatively, you’ll find that delegation will become easy.

Take good care,

Christian

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