You need to delegate tasks to your team members. How can you be sure they’re up to the challenge?

Ensuring team members are up to the challenge involves assessing strengths, clear communication of objectives, providing necessary training and resources, regular check-ins, feedback, encouragement, recognition, empowerment, delegation of authority, and risk management. By following these steps, team members are equipped and empowered to handle tasks effectively, contributing to project success.

When delegating tasks, I ensure team members are up to the challenge by assessing their strengths and workload. Clear instructions and expectations are provided, along with necessary support and resources. Open communication is maintained for questions or concerns. Progress is monitored, feedback is provided, and interventions are made if needed. This approach ensures tasks are completed successfully and on time.

1. Assess team members' skills, expertise, and past performance. 2. Clearly define task requirements, objectives, and expectations. 3. Provide necessary resources, training, and support. 4. Establish communication channels for clarifications and updates. 5. Monitor progress through regular check-ins and milestone reviews. 6. Offer guidance and coaching as needed to ensure success. 7. Encourage autonomy and accountability while fostering a supportive team environment.

To be able to delegate effectively and without fear and reservations, we must be aware of competence of our team members. Many of us are unable to delegate to desired extent due to reasons listed below: 1) You believe no one can do it better than you. 2) You are not aware of team's skill and competence levels 3) You do not understand how delegation works 4) You are not aware how can make the best use of your limited time as a leader; in essence, you are not able to prioritize your work 5) You do not know how to groom and develop the team It is imperative that you figure out ways to assess team competence via feedback, on-the-job monitoring or shadowing, surveys, reviews, LMS, and online learning tool assessments and establish baselines.

It is important that the expectations are made crystal clear to all the people to whom you are delegating work. Many times, we are thinking in our heads that this will be done by this guy in this manner without sharing the desired level of information. We are setting ourselves up for failure if we are not communicating clearly with our delegates. We must ensure the team members understand: 1) Scope of assignment 2) Parameters of success, timelines and constraints 3) Outcomes desired and what success means 4) Mechanisms to assess progress, measure gaps and address them 5) Communicate progress, 1-1 connections, recognition of good work and handling of conflicts.

It is said that accountability, responsibility, and authority must go hand-in-hand. For delegation to be successful: 1) Desired level of independence and authority must be provided to individuals 2) Appropriate resources, both human and non-human, are provided 3) Trainings to bridge gaps in skills, if any 4) Instill confidence, motivate, mentor, and provide timely feedback 5) Build strong relations based on trust, respect and faith for open communications

Delegation isn't a one-and-done deal — it's an ongoing journey of growth and refinement. Take the time to review how tasks were handled, gathering feedback from your team along the way. What worked? What could use tweaking? By staying open to input and constantly learning from successes and setbacks, you'll become a better program manager and also a more effective delegator, ensuring tasks are handled with finesse and efficiency every step of the way.

Effective leaders, let others lead. I look at the project and envision a soccer field (one person can’t win the game,e, it has to be a team effort) 1. Ambitious people need to play the role of front runners 2. Well balanced people need to play the mid fielders 3. Growing people need to play defenders 4. You play the goalie With this, you build a dynamo of performance based on your risk assessment. People will keep on swapping places based on their learning curves and how it aligns with the vision of the project. This will give autonomy to the team to make decisions based on the needs and give you the control of the end outcome.