Preparing to Delegate
You may have a general idea about the project or task you’d like to delegate, but before making an assignment you’ll want to do some prep work. You’ll need to note your reasons for delegating, determine exactly what work to hand off (and what not to), decide how large a slice of the work you’ll delegate (just a task or an entire function?), and specify the skills required to successfully complete it. Next you’ll identify the best person for the assignment and determine the level of authority to be delegated. Following all these steps may seem like overkill, but doing so will ensure that you make the right assignment to the right person for the right reasons—and with a high probability of success. Let’s walk through each step.
Consider your reasons for delegating
As you’re mulling over work you could assign to someone else on your team, take a moment to review why you’re looking to delegate. What do you hope to achieve? Do you simply want to decrease your workload, or do you need to off-load lower-level administrative jobs so you can concentrate on a specific project, such as assessing the effectiveness of your staff’s interactions with clients? Perhaps your objective is to motivate your team members and improve morale by increasing their levels of responsibility or helping them extend their capabilities into new technologies and processes. Maybe you have a combination of reasons.
Carefully thinking through why you’re looking to delegate will help you set clear goals when you make the assignment and more easily assess how well you’ve achieved your purpose once the assignment is complete. Goals in mind, you’re ready to start flagging specific pieces of work you could delegate to others.
Determine what (and what not) to delegate
As you assess your workload to see which tasks, projects, or functions you might delegate, consider:
• Jobs that others could readily do. Although you probably enjoy some of the tasks that fall into this category, which can make them hard to give up, be open to delegating them. For instance, assigning a small task from an important project to a new employee eager for advancement—such as logging bugs and fixes as a project moves through development—could motivate her while providing you with insight on how well she follows through on assignments.
• Jobs that require specific training or experience. Delegating this type of work can give staff members interesting and challenging opportunities. For example, training a reliable team member to take over your role on an interdepartment task force would increase the employee’s collaborative and technical skills, as well as his visibility.
For jobs you deem too important to delegate wholesale, consider ways you might share the responsibility with someone. Could you subdivide a task, project, or function so you handle a discrete part and delegate the rest? The following examples illustrate the importance of flexibility in determining what to delegate:
• Marisol, a department head, decided to share responsibility for a software evaluation project that has companywide impact. She asked Larry, a member of her team, to request proposals from potential vendors and to track what came from where. Marisol then enlisted Larry’s help in reviewing the proposals by asking for his feedback, but she took the ultimate responsibility for evaluating the proposals—and for making the final choice of vendors.
• For a number of years, Yuan designed, administered, and documented an annual employee job satisfaction survey. After his promotion to manager, however, he lacked the bandwidth this sizable project demanded. Siphoning his time and energy from more pressing responsibilities and sacrificing his weekends to work on the project didn’t seem like attractive options. Yuan’s solution? He formed a task force. Under his leadership and oversight, Emma and Kervin, two direct reports with solid analytical skills, took on the most time-consuming parts of the job, such as survey development and coding. When the final survey report was circulated within the company, Yuan shared the credit for its successful completion with Emma and Kervin.
For jobs seen as boring or unpleasant—cleaning out files and making cold calls come to mind—promote collaboration and a supportive environment by dividing tasks among your staff members and doing a few yourself. Also, use the delegation of less desirable work as a chance to seek input from your staff about the types of assignments they would find appealing.
Not all work, however, can or should be delegated. As a manager, you must retain responsibility for activities such as the following:
• Directing and motivating your team
• Aligning your team’s strategy with company goals
• Evaluating employee performance
• Helping your direct reports develop their careers
• Hiring and firing staff members
• Handling complex customer negotiations
• Performing tasks that require your specific set of technical skills
Once you’ve identified the type of work you’d like to delegate, you need to consider how much of it you’ll turn over. Will you delegate just a single task (asking someone to pull a list from the customer database for an e-mail campaign)? Or an entire function (conceiving and implementing the marketing plan for your company’s new service)? Let’s review your options.
Choose how much of the work to delegate
You have a general sense of the kinds of things you want to hand off, but as you narrow your options down, consider how much of the work you’ll transfer:
• Delegating by task. Assigning specific tasks or subtasks, such as writing a report, conducting research, or planning a meeting, is the most basic approach. You’ll probably want to start here.
• Delegating by project. Assigning a group of tasks designed to achieve a specific objective is a broader approach than task-level delegation. Delegating by project—for example, developing a new employee handbook, conducting a customer survey, or training employees on a new computer system—increases the scope of the assignment and generally requires a staff member who can handle a wide range of responsibilities.
• Delegating by function. Assigning groups of tasks and projects related to one ongoing activity, such as sales, marketing, or training, involves delegating a particular function to one staff member who will provide you with regular updates within that function. For example, you might assign your resident IT expert oversight of networking systems for all projects.
Now that you have a good idea of your goals and you’ve identified both the type and extent of work you’ll be delegating, you’re ready to assess the skills that are needed to ensure the project’s success.
Identify the skills required
Before selecting the person for a given assignment, analyze the job and determine the skills it requires. During your analysis, answer these questions:
• What kinds of thinking skills are needed for this job? Does the work require problem-solving ability, logical thinking, decision making, planning, or creative design?
• What are the activities that must be performed for the assignment, and what systems or equipment will be needed? Do the activities include creating a new database, for instance, or organizing, training, or developing?
• What interpersonal skills—such as negotiating with suppliers, conducting interviews with experts, or handling delivery complaints with customers—are needed to complete the assignment?
To illustrate this kind of analysis, assume your group has been asked to customize the user manual for the company’s new intranet so employees in various departments—from R&D to production to sales—will know how to use the features most relevant to their jobs. It’s a corporate-level project with company-wide visibility, but the deadline is way too imminent for you to undertake the project alone. Shauna, a bright, energetic new hire with manual-writing experience, has offered to lead the effort. It seems like a perfect opportunity. But before assigning it to her, you carefully evaluate what’s involved and identify exactly what skills the project demands. Through this process, you realize that the project requires deeper skills than Shauna has at this point, although they are skills she has explicitly told you she wants to develop. So instead of delegating the entire project to her, you establish a project team with a more senior lead than Shauna and try to match her skills with specific project tasks that support the larger project. Her work on those tasks will then inform future assignments and help you identify training opportunities for her.
When you have a number of assignments to delegate, it can be helpful to make up a log or spreadsheet on which you can specify your criteria for each proposed item: expected results, deadline, milestones, skills required, and so on. Use this tool to match people to jobs and to uncover where training might be necessary. This activity will also help you track how often you’re using any one person for various types of jobs so you can better balance the dream assignments—and the drudgery.
Select the most suitable person
Once you know what’s required for a task, project, or function, review the strengths and weaknesses of your staff. Recognize that not all skills are transferable to all situations (for instance, a great telephone sales representative may freeze in a face-to-face situation).
As you compare the skills required with the characteristics and capabilities of your staff members, keep these factors in mind about each person being considered:
• Growth and development. In what ways could the work address the expressed interests and needs of your staff members to try on new roles or take on stretch assignments?
• Development of new skills. Consider how an assignment might challenge a staff member to expand his competencies.
• Availability. You may want to avoid choosing an employee whose work on a more critical project would be interrupted.
• Previous assignments. Try to delegate tasks even-handedly among your staff members to help improve the skills of each, as well as to avoid the appearance of favoritism.
• Assistance required. Determine how much help would be needed from you for successful completion of the assignment and how much time you have available.
• Time on the job. Don’t give new employees extra assignments until they’re fully settled in.
Avoid delegating only to those people you know will accept added work without complaint. Reliable staff members may be flattered by your confidence in them, but without proper compensation or recognition, continually delegating to the same individual—even a willing one—can lead to resentment, absenteeism, and even defection.
As you contemplate your options, don’t hesitate to take advantage of the skills of more than one person. When you have a pool of resources to choose from, pairing people with complementary skills can help you achieve the best results:
• Ask a staff member with great people skills to conduct telephone interviews with customers and a staff member with great analytical skills to examine the feedback and compile data.
• Have a person with excellent writing skills draft the text for a new brochure and a person with graphics and production skills complete the layout and manage the final printing.
Routinely keeping track of the special skills of your staff members—and logging their skills into the spreadsheet discussed earlier—will help you match people to assignments. For example, someone who can simplify abstract concepts might be a good person to conduct database implementation training, whereas an employee with good organizational abilities might be a suitable choice for overseeing warehousing operations. Also, to make the best use of staff resources and build your employees’ capabilities, delegate to the lowest possible skill level required.
When considering whom to assign work to, don’t overlook people beyond your own group—and don’t forget your supervisor or your peers in other groups as possible resources. In some instances you may save time and money and gain needed expertise by assigning work to talent outside your organization, such as freelancers, consultants, or other temporary workers.
Here’s an example of how your selection process could play out: You’d like to ask Anil, an experienced, logical-thinking member of your staff, to research how customers are using a high-profit-margin electrical component your company manufactures. His objective would be to learn about possible new telecommunications applications. In addition to being familiar with the industry, Anil has mastered the people skills necessary to mine the data and to communicate his findings to engineering and marketing managers. The more you consider Anil, the better you feel about him as a candidate, yet you know there are other variables you should take into account. Anil’s availability is one: He’s expressed the desire to take on this time-consuming project, but his existing workload is heavy. In addition, you’d need to provide him with extra help from within your team to ensure the project’s successful completion. If you believe Anil is interested but too busy, but you still feel he’s the right person for the job, you might reassign some of his current project work to another team member, or you could give Anil primary responsibility for the project and suggest that he get help from one or two other staff members (say, to sort and compile the data he obtains).
Now that you have the right person, you’ll need to determine what level of authority to grant him to allow effective execution of the assignment.
Decide on the level of authority to grant
The level of authority you choose to grant should depend on the requirements of the assignment, the employee’s capabilities, and your level of confidence in the person you’ve selected. To determine the kind of authority you’ll grant to your employee:
• Assess the employee’s past performance in making decisions.
• Consider the consequences of wrong decisions, and decide what degree of risk you’re willing to take.
• Determine the minimum amount of authority your employee will need to complete the assignment successfully and efficiently. (You wouldn’t want the employee to have to come to you for approvals every step of the way.)
Several options exist along the broad spectrum of authority. You can decide that your employee may:
• Make and implement decisions as needed without prior consultation with you.
• Make decisions as needed, but notify you before implementing them.
• Make recommendations for a final decision, which you must then approve.
• Provide you with several alternatives, from which you’ll make a final decision.
• Provide you with relevant information, from which you’ll develop alternatives and then consult with your employee to reach a decision.
What might granting a specific level of authority look like in real life? Say you place Cy in charge of approving purchase orders for your unit. You specify a dollar limit within which he has free rein and a range of expenses that he can approve but must report to you. For all other purchase orders, he must research alternative products or services and review the requests with you.
In addition to granting a specific level of authority, you can eliminate confusion and encourage initiative and problem solving by delegating responsibility to one person rather than dividing it among a number of people—even if you are delegating the work to a number of people. Make sure every person involved clearly understands who is ultimately responsible for the outcome. For example, you might assign the responsibility for reviewing, approving, and submitting expense reports to one of your employees, who, in turn, asks a colleague to follow up with finance to ensure that reimbursements are made on time. Regardless of how follow-up is delegated, your direct report remains responsible.
Now that you’ve determined what to delegate to whom, and at what level of authority, you can proceed to the next step: actually assigning the work.