Succeeding in business has always been tough. These days, it’s downright brutal. What do you need most? Time. What do you need even more? All the help you can get! Delegation is essentially asking for help and  doing it in such a way that your team members will want to help you.

Effective delegation is key to business success and having a life.

Some successful leaders work 80+ hours a week. None can realistically look back and say they had to work long hours because there was no one available for delegation. Isn’t your number one job to put a team in place so you can lead initiatives bigger than your capability?

This is true at all levels. Even the most successful Senior Executives would say they could do a better job at delegation. In his book The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni highlights the failure to clearly delegate and to hold people accountable as two of the major issues for a CEO.

Delegation is the assignment of authority and responsibility to another person (sometimes from a manager to a subordinate but increasingly from a Subject Matter Expert to team members) to carry out specific activities. However, the person who delegated the work remains accountable for the outcome of the delegated work. Good delegation allows a team member or subordinate to make decisions, i.e. it is a shift of decision-making authority.

Delegation is one of the most important management skills. Good delegation saves you time, develops team members, grooms successors, and motivates. Poor delegation will cause you frustration, de-motivates and confuses the other person, and fails to achieve the task or purpose itself. So it’s a management skill that’s worth improving.

The objective of delegation is to get the job done by someone else. Not just the simple tasks but also the decision making and changes which depend upon new information. With delegation, your team member staff has the knowledge and authority to react to situations without referring to you.

The Delegation Trap™ – Do You Delegate Well?

    Your workweek is only extended with pre-planned activities.
    When you delegate a task, you outline the objective, define success, set a deadline for completion, schedule progress reviews, ensure resources and authority are transferred, reward success.
    Your team members handle assigned tasks and handle emergencies.
    You focus 80% of your work time to the strategic areas of the business or tasks in your talent zone.
    All your team members & subordinates have your complete confidence.
    Your team members and subordinates produce results that consistently meet & exceed your expectations.
    Team members and subordinates morale is excellent.
    Your team members and subordinates always exercise their decision-making authority.
    New ideas presented to you are completely thought through so that all that remains to be done is to indicate approval or not.
    You are able to take extended business trips and vacations with little or no impact on the day-to-day operations.
    Team members and subordinates handle problems and crisis within their responsibility and rarely escalate to you.
    You have an effective process in place to direct all non-essential mail through the appropriate team members.
    You schedule a portion of each day for calls and do not take them outside of this time unless emergencies.
    You start each week with a list of prioritized actions and knock them off in order of priority.
    Your team members and subordinates are always clear on your expectations.
    Your organization is such that you can quickly get any papers or information you need.
  • After you click submit, it will take a few moments for you to get your results. Patience is a virtue.