Delegation – Xcelerator

Summary

Many times you may feel that the tasks you have are overwhelming. You feel that you lack hours in a day, or in a week, to reach your goal of getting work done. You are leading a team, but you don’t know if they can help you.

Basics for delegating:

If you delegate too little, you probably do it because you are over-executing. The lack of delegation becomes an overload of work for ourselves, often neglecting quality.

Five important things to keep in mind when delegating:

Who do you delegate to? You trust that person will be able to fulfill what you expect.
Explain well the purpose of the delegation well. Make it clear to your collaborator.
Give the necessary resources to fulfill the task that has been entrusted.
Establish the monitoring plan. The person in charge is still you. You delegate the task, not the responsibility.
Get out of the way. Follow the progress according to the monitoring plan.

You delegate everything that can be delegated. Delegating does not mean that you do nothing, you delegate those tasks that can be entrusted to a collaborator. So, you have the time to do tasks that add value to the organization.

Don’t delegate to messengers, delegate to managers. When you delegate messengers, they work by dictation, in some way they remain dependent on you and you become the bottleneck. When you delegate to managers, they have autonomy and therefore will be more versatile when making decisions. They will learn more about the task they are carrying out and they will be more autonomous, gaining valuable experience.

You can give partial delegations. By doing so, you train your team to develop skills and experience.

The reasons for not delegating are often arrogance, insecurity, the need to feel essential, fear that they believe that I am not doing my job, or that there are other ways of doing the job.

Your job is to get your entire team to do its job: creating the conditions for the team to do what it has to do. You set goals, plan, etc. and the team supports you to carry out the tasks that are necessary to meet the objectives.

Be grateful. Whatever the result, good or bad, be grateful. If it is good it motivates, if it is bad it helps your collaborator learn from mistakes and continue to grow.

Questionnaire

If you don’t delegate, ask yourself if this is a lack of trust in your own abilities, or a lack of trust in your collaborators.
What five things are important to consider when delegating?
When you delegate, who is responsible for ensuring that the task is completed on time, objectives and quality?
If you delegate, do your collaborators gain experience and autonomy? Is that good?

Reflection

Delegating not only allows you to be more effective in your work, it allows you to develop your collaborators, generate autonomy and use time and resources more efficiently.
In the words of a senior executive “I am not the boss who knows, I am the boss of those who know.” If you delegate properly, you will be as good as your team is.