How to delegate effectively?
A simple approach to breaking down your heavy workload through delegation principles.
If you have not been delegating yet, you must have heard numerous times that you have to do it - “You have too much work, you should delegate!”, “Why don’t you delegate it to someone?”, “You should not be doing this work, that’s why we hired another employee”. It feels like the right thing to do, but in practice it has not been successful. Nobody can do things the way that you want, you always can accomplish the task faster. Why should you even delegate in this case? Let’s dive in and explore what might be happening and how we can help you take your performance to the next level.
What is delegation anyway? It is a predefined task or responsibility that you have taken from your heap and handed over to another person. This definition is very simple but it consists of a few very important components that take a bit of time to master. These are:
Task Isolation
Clear Requirements
Best Practices
Communicating task, timeline and quality expectations
Regular follow-ups
Collecting and giving feedback
What do these components consist of?
Task Isolation
is probably the most difficult part of the process. It requires you to build out intuition to look at your whole workload and start seeing tasks that can be independently spun off to others. We are used to looking at our workload as a whole that we have to push over the line ourselves. However, the personal growth comes from recognition that almost all of the workloads can be subdivided into chunks, chunks of time or chunks of responsibility. Look for opportunities to practice this isolation skill anytime a new project crosses your path. Start seeing shapes of these chunks where you notice hints of increased cognitive, mechanical or specific expertise. Perhaps you are an expert on negotiations, but the task requires negotiating with the Middle Eastern partners. Instead of racing up the learning curve yourself, consider calling up your colleagues that have done this task before and leverage their experience. This optimizes your time spent, yet results in a similar type of learning as you don’t have to repeat their mistakes.
Sometimes it is really hard to do task isolation. I occasionally resort to mental tools to work through the difficulties. They are three simple questions oriented around restraints in my personal workload potential.
What if you are working at 50% capacity? Who/How would you hand over the work?
What if you have to delegate to your exact clone? How would you approach change?
What if you went away for two months? What would happen?
Asking these questions helps you come up with ways tasks could be isolated.
Clear requirements
are important because they highlight all of the important aspects of the task at hand. It is an art to be able to take what is inside your head, get it down on a proverbial paper with the expectation that what has been written will be understood in the same way that you thought you would. The main difficulty is that humans have unique brains (surprise!) and your tom-EH-Y-to, could very well be their tom-AH-to. Best way to bypass it is to have a draft of the requirements ready and to have a conversation. Have the other person go through the requirements and then verbally tell you back how they understood the assignment. It will surprise you how frequently this step saves hours of misunderstood work. I use this step - “summarize this back to me please” all the time and it is important to building a high-quality communication channel between co-workers. Occasionally, tasks cross industry boundaries or over knowledge gaps, and you will have to resort to analogies in order to communicate yourself clearly. Analogies are easy to understand, yet a super effective communication tool.
Best Practices
- if this is a type of a recurring task that you have been delegating, it is good to put together a manual that can be used to execute the task in the most efficient manner given your experience. Your employee does not have to start at the beginning of the learning curve and can leverage your personal experience. Additionally, if you are required to put specific kinds of final touches on your work, the person will be able to follow your written guidance to polish off the deliverable.
Two-way Communication
Since now the task is outside of your head, literally, your internal clock is disconnected from the work being done. You have to establish a way that can be synced to your timeline. It is important to understand the pace of the other person and communicate your timelines clearly. This is also a good time to explore the ways that the other person communicates and is being the most efficient - chat, in-person, email, or perhaps group meetings. Everybody’s interface is different and discussing communication preferences prevents friction down the line. Additionally if you prefer work to be done following a specific framework or tool, it should be mentioned clearly, so you don’t have to redo the work.
Regular Follow-ups
are important to sync up with the original expectations. As I have mentioned before, humans are not telepathic beings and it is important to have regular check ins to align whether the current work in progress aligns with what was originally assigned. Make sure to communicate this approach at the beginning so the person can make themselves available and open to the feedback when you meet again.
Collecting and giving feedback
Once the work is handed over in whatever form, it is important to have a close out conversation, a retrospective on how the whole process went. There are always things that could have gone better - more timely check-ins, clearer details of the assignment, more time for deep dive, improvements for best practices. It is best to ask for feedback first, before offering some. It is always good to ask a more generic question of “what do you believe could have gone better from both sides?” This way in the future when you are delegating again, you can reduce the time spent on on-boarding the person to a new task.
In closing, I want to give you another imagination exercise which fits all of these components together. The context of the exercise is to understand how scaling can happen for the type of work that you are currently doing. Imagine that you are a factory producing a service or goods. That factory has a lot of working components that have their own purpose. As more “materials” show up at the door, each appropriate component needs to be scaled in order to handle the road. Sometimes that component has to be outsourced to a different factory, but that can only be done through a good relationship and proper specification. You get the idea. As your workload grows, the more you have to rely on the service of others in order to scale your factory of one.
Hope this was helpful! Happy delegation!
