8 Steps to Delegate Effectively
Learning how to assign tasks to others and to delegate effectively is vital if you want to lead and manage others, and certainly is if you want to progress in a management career. If you don’t learn ways to delegate effectively, you will remain stuck doing the tasks you should delegate to others.
Many new to management think that delegating is telling someone to do a task, and then sitting back to wait for it be delivered exactly as we want it and on time. I suggest following the 8 steps outlined in this article, so you don’t get a very rude shock – when you don’t get want you want and it is a week later than you expected.
Written by Jess Coles – 10 Minute Read
8 steps to Delegate Effectively:
- Know What to Delegate
- Play to team member’s strengths
- Set Clearly Defined goals
- Provide Context and the Why
- Allocate the Right Resources and Authority Level
- Follow-up and Stay Involved
- Coach, Mentor and Provide Specific feedback
- Praise Good Results
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The first step to delegate effectively: Know What to Delegate
There are lots of tasks and projects you could delegate. The challenge is working out what you should delegate to others and what you should keep yourself. Certain tasks you cannot delegate, such as appraisals, direction setting and the core tasks of managing a team.
The types of tasks that you should think about delegating to team members are likely to fall into the following five categories:
- Time-consuming tasks – the best ones to delegate are the lower value creating tasks which are repetitive
- Teachable tasks – the tasks which you can teach to team members who have the right skills and aptitudes to do the task well
- Time-sensitive tasks – any tasks that need to be done by a deadline and you don’t have the time to do it
- Tasks you are poor at – these are tasks that a team members or others can do quicker and/or better than you
- Tasks that will be good Development Opportunities – to build the skills, knowledge, and experience of your team members
Look to delegate tasks so you personally can then take on additional tasks that will add greater value to the business. This keeps your career moving forward and keeps you moving up the value chain of tasks, activities, and projects within the business.
Build a list of tasks and projects you do. Prioritise them based on their value creation and then look to delegate the tasks and projects towards the bottom of the list. Keep coming back to the list periodically.
Play to team member’s strengths – the second step
Playing to strengths when delegating tasks or projects is important to ensure the team member completes the delegated task well. Ideally, you want them to do the task or project better than you would do it.
Each team member will have different strengths, ambitions, and interests. Learning what each team members’ strengths and interests are is of course super important to delegate effectively. Match up the team members best suited and most interested to do each task or project you want to delegate.
In the real world, you often have to delegate to those not ideally suited to the task, because those that are stronger are already fully maxed out or politics gets in the way, etc. When this happens, put more effort into the other steps such as staying involved and coaching, mentoring, and providing feedback. This can compensate for the less skilled person doing the task.
Flex your approach depending on who you are delegating tasks to and based on what work you are assigning to team members. Do your best to play to team members strengths when assigning work to others.
The third step to delegate effectively: Set Clearly Defined goals
There is little worse than being given a task without being told the goal. Each time you delegate work, you should:
- decide what goals represents success for the work you are delegating
- the person you are delegating to must be equally clear as to what the goals are and how progress is going to be measured against these goals
You need to judge whether a verbal agreement is enough or whether you need to put the task and goals into writing and sent it to them via email. I have found this very much depends on the person and the complexity of the task. The more complex or critical the task, the more likely I would follow-up the verbal discussion with a quick email summary or even a one page summary document.
Creating a reference email or document reduces confusion and project or task slip due to different understandings being taken away from the initial discussion. Putting the details into writing makes what has been delegated and the goals clear for both parties.
Always try to set clearly defined goals when you delegate work to others and check to make sure both parties are clear what these goals are.
Provide Context and the Why – the fourth step to delegate effectively
I have found that providing the context to the task or project – in effect explaining the Why we are doing this task or project:
- Improves motivation and buy in of the other person as they understand how the task or project fits into the larger picture within the business
- Explaining why improves the other person’s ability to successfully work around the smaller problems that invariably come up without having to speak to me
- Improves their judgement of when they need to speak with me about problems or issues with the task or project.
All of these allow the other person to do the task or project better compared to if they have not been given the context or the why and thus makes the delegation more effective.
The team member also gets to learn more about how the task interacts with other tasks and projects going on within the business which helps them learn.
When delegating tasks, make the time to explain the context of the task or project. Explain how it fits into the team or functional goals or fits into the company strategy. I view this an essential part of delegating and assigning work to others.
The Fifth step: Allocate the Right Resources and Authority Level
Whether you do the work yourself or delegate the work to team members, you want the work to be delivered successfully and the goals reached. This is by far the best result for everyone – and for you personally.
Having the right resources available at the right level at the right time can make a huge difference to the outcome. So take the time to plan the essentials needed for the project or task to be successful. Work out what extra resources are sensible to complete the task quicker, cheaper, or better.
In all businesses, resources are constrained so prioritising where these resources get used is an important task of management. Create the best conditions for success that you can when you assign work to others
Examples of resources include things like:
- Time
- Cash
- Manpower
- Skills and knowledge
- Access to systems or data at the right level
Don’t forget to set and communicate the right authority levels for the person you are delegating to so they can undertake the work as effectively as possible. Setting the right authority levels also maintains good risk management for the business.
Follow-up and Stay Involved – the sixth step to delegate effectively
Monitor the task or project you have delegated so you can make yourself available to help if the team member you have delegated to runs into trouble, falls behind or encounters resistance.
Delegating a task, then walking away until the delivery point of course can work – usually for the simpler tasks or with your best team members. The more complex the task, project or problem, the more moving parts and more people involved, the higher the chance of problems arising that need to be resolved and for delays to occur. For this reason, keeping tabs on progress gives you an early warning of these problems and gives you the best chance of reducing or avoiding problems.
Following up:
The task of checking in with the person doing the work, asking about progress, and being there to help is – in my opinion – practiced too little by the majority of managers. The task of following up is essentially about managing the people aspects – of focus, of prioritisation, of getting enough effort put in. Following up also demonstrates that this task or project is important to you, therefore becomes important to the person doing the work.
Every business I have worked in has multiple projects and tasks going on at once, all demanding the time and attention of employees. If you are not keeping their attention and time on your task or project, chances are they will end up to doing other ones that seem more important, because those managers are following up more.
Just for the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that you micromanage individuals, which 95%+ of the time is detrimental to them, the task and you as a manager.
Make the time to monitor the project or task and stay involved so you can help your team members if needed.
The seventh step to delegate effectively: Coach, Mentor and Provide Specific feedback
Without feedback on what went well and what didn’t go so well, it is very hard to learn and improve.
Assuming you want your team members to get better at their jobs individually and as a team, then making the time to coach, mentor and provide specific feedback is essential. This gives your team great opportunities to improve their performance, skill level and what they deliver – which in turn benefits you as their manager.
Additional Benefits
Some of the many additional benefits from coaching, mentoring, and providing feedback, include:
- Increased motivation and loyalty of team members
- Increased engagement and work ethic
- Reduced staff turnover
- Increased interest in internal staff moves to your team
- Quicker career progression for you and your team members
- Better knowledge of what team members are working on and what challenges they face
I booked in a weekly one-to-one meeting with each of my direct reports and insisted they also do the same with their reports. I used this time mainly to coach, mentor and provide specific feedback. Booking in the meeting each week signalled the importance I placed on learning and improvement. It also made sure team members got regular coaching, mentoring and feedback.
Praise Good Results – the final step
Positive reinforcement works, plus everyone likes to receive praise, particularly when you have worked hard to deliver some great work. There is too little praise within many workplaces. Research has shown that to keep a staff member engaged and happy, you need to praise 3 times more than criticise. 3 times!
When giving praise, make sure you are specific with your praise. Describe what happened, the impact, why the action and results were good and add in how they might improve further if appropriate.
Make sure your praise is honest, sincere, and given soon after the results are delivered.
You can praise in private, in public, give prizes – in fact there are so many ways to praise. Do make the time to praise team members, get comfortable doing so and look for opportunities to praise.
In Summary
So I have taken your quickly through an 8 step framework to delegate work effectively to employees and colleagues. Do follow each of the steps and discover the benefits of getting better at delegating.
The eight steps are as a reminder
- Know What to Delegate
- Play to team member’s strengths
- Set Clearly Defined goals
- Provide Context and the Why
- Allocate the Right Resources and Authority Level
- Follow-up and Stay Involved
- Coach, Mentor and Provide Specific feedback
- Praise Good Results
My advice is always keep looking to improve your delegation skills and how you assign work to team members. Your career progress depends on it.
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