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A good manager is not the one who takes everything on his shoulders, but the one who is able to assemble a strong effective team and competently distribute responsibilities, including unplanned ones.
Delegation, that is, delegating tasks from one employee to another, helps 6 Strategies For Engaging Your Employees / Harvard Business School Online to increase the level of involvement in the team, and managers who have succeeded in this, on average bring Delegating: A Huge Management Challenge for Entrepreneurs / Gallup Business Journal their companies have 33% more revenue than others.
But just saying "do this" is wrong. A commanding tone, a poorly scheduled task, lack of explanations — all this can cause rejection and eventually end up with not the best result.
Harvard Business School expert Lauren Landry told How To Delegate Effectively: 9 Tips For Managers / Harvard Business School Online about rules that will help delegate efficiently and improve performance.
There are tasks that cannot be delegated. For example, they are an integral part of your responsibilities. Or another employee does not have enough knowledge and qualifications to perform such tasks. Or, on the contrary, they are much simpler than the ones he usually deals with. For example, asking a sales manager or an auditor to find a master to repair an office coffee machine would be, to put it mildly, inappropriate.
In general, before you entrust something to someone, it's worth asking yourself:
For example, you need to organize team building for the whole team, but there is no special employee for this. But there is a person who is strong in communication and would like to gain experience in organizing events, training and personnel management. You can offer this task to him.
Or the company was temporarily left without an SMM specialist, but there is someone who is well versed in the algorithms of social networks and is not averse to trying himself in marketing.
Of course, this is not always possible. There are boring tasks that no one likes. But still, it would not be superfluous to critically evaluate the team and think about who the new assignment could benefit.
When addressing an employee, explain why you want to assign the task to him, how it can be useful for the company and for him personally. Don't forget to praise and list his strengths that influenced your choice. Be polite.
Tell us in detail about the task. Set a clear goal and deadlines. Provide all necessary documents and other information. It will be quite good if all the necessary materials are clear and structured, so that the employee does not have to spend many hours figuring out what's what.
Let the person understand that you are always there to help, prompt, answer questions. Warn him that if for some reason he does not cope or breaks deadlines, he will be able to talk to you and you will come up with something together.
Ask him what he needs to complete the task. You may need to provide him with additional information or, for example, release him from current affairs.
At the same time, it is important to remain friendly so that the employee really does not hesitate to contact you if something goes wrong.
When you complete a task on your own, you are in full control of the situation. If someone else takes on the job, a million problems may arise, because of which the result will not be very good or the deadlines will be disrupted.
Think in advance what you will do in case of an unfavorable development of events. Be ready to pick up the task yourself or quickly delegate it to someone else.
Try to treat such situations not as a failure, but as an experience that will help you better understand your team, its capabilities and the level of organization.Yes, there are things that are faster to do yourself than to entrust someone, and then spend time answering questions and monitoring the result.
It is important to remember that you are not a person‑orchestra, and for effective work you need to develop your team, give employees the opportunity to do something new, become more competent, learn, including from their mistakes.
This means that you will have to be patient if someone asks too many questions or copes with the task more slowly than you expected.
When the task is done, be sure to tell the employee how you evaluate his work: what you liked and what you are ready to praise him for, what points could be improved, what should be done for this and what to pay attention to in the future.
Be correct. Do not swear, do not raise your voice, do not devalue and do not criticize for no reason. Be sure to start with praise, and then gently tell us what you need to work on.
If the task was new and difficult for a person, ask him how he worked on it. What was easy and what was not, what was interesting and what was not at all pleasant, how he himself evaluates the result, what he would like to improve and how he plans to do it.
And not only one-on-one, but also publicly, especially if the task was not easy. Praise the person in front of the whole team, give him an extra day off, mark him as the best employee if this is practiced in the company.
Also, you should not appropriate the fruits of someone else's labor. Instead of saying "I organized a team building" or "I prepared a report", it is better to emphasize that you prepared everything together and your colleague helped a lot. People appreciate when their merits are recognized, it makes them more involved in work and loyal to the company.
