What do you do if you want to delegate tasks but also continue growing professionally?

Growing professionally almost always includes delegation. The higher you go up in an organization, the more you deal with strategy and the less you do hands-on work. It helps to have experience in that hands-on work so that you know better how to support your team, but at a certain point it's not up to you to enact your strategies. Make sure your team has the information and resources required to do their work, and trust them to do it.

Delegation should not be seen as a step-back, instead it is a stepping stone for future developments. When you delegate a part of the responsibilities to another Associate it not only leads to the enhancement of your skills but it also sharpens the skills of the other members, whereby they are people to potray their skills better, which in turn creates a stronger team.

Part of giving your team the information and resources to do their work is clarity of goals and standards. Let your team know how their work is relevant to greater organizational goals, and what it means to be successful in their work. Ideally, create an environment of continuous feedback and communication so that when issues arise you can mentor your team through solutions, helping them figure out their own solutions whenever possible.

Employee training pays back dividends. Hiring junior people and training them over time to earn promotions means that you'll have a more motivated workforce that stays with you longer, thus reducing the expense and loss of institutional knowledge that comes with turnover. It also means that your employees will be more productive in their current roles since they'll have more information and context to bring to their work. Leaving people to figure out everything on their own research will waste time and money.

Just as you give feedback to your team to make their work better, get feedback from them to make your work better. You can evaluate some of your performance from the productivity of your team, but there's always things we can do better, and people doing the ground-level work will have a better idea of how to improve things just by virtue of doing that work every day.

If you haven't already, invest in management training. Being a great manager is hard to do, and most people learn by doing - and just like with any other business learning, it's far more productive to receive training than to try and figure it out on your own.