How can you effectively delegate tasks and responsibilities in a startup?

While delegating might feel like losing control or making people do work, if done properly, it subconsciously tells your team that you trust them and that you believe in their skills.

Not every task can be delegated. For example, performance reviews or any personnel matters should be handled by you. After all, hiring the right talent and knowing each employee’s strengths and weaknesses will ultimately make you better at assigning deliverables and transferring responsibility to the appropriate team members.

Every employee should have goals they’re working toward, and within those goals are opportunities to delegate. For example, maybe you have a direct report who wants to gain management experience. Is there an intern they could start supervising, or a well-defined project they can own the execution of? The type of work you delegate could factor into their professional development plan.

To successfully delegate you must: - Provide a full explanation of he request and always share the meaning and purpose of the request - Explain the benefits of the task i.e. how doe it help the development of the delegate - Ensure timely feedback is provided

“You’ve got to have real clarity of objective,” says Harvard Business School Professor Kevin Sharer in the online Management Essentials course. That includes having alignment on “what does good look like” and by what timeline, and “the technique of measuring accomplishment.” Before anyone starts working on a project, they should know what they need to complete and by when, including the metrics you’ll use to measure the success of their work.

If the person you’re delegating work to needs specific training, resources, or authority to complete the assigned project, it’s your role as a manager to provide all three. Setting someone up for an impossible task will frustrate both sides; your colleague won’t be able to achieve the desired outcome, and then you’ll likely need to put that work back on your to-do list.

There are three indicators to use when thinking about delegating a task: - You don't like doing the task - You have an employee that is great at doing it / enjoys doing it - It will help with an employees development.

While you want to avoid micromanaging, you do want to establish a communication channel so that the person you’re delegating to feels comfortable asking questions and providing progress updates. “You’ve got to have some way to communicate so that the person you delegated to can come back to you and report,” says Sharer in the Management Essentials course. “You’ve got to have some way along the way to see how things are going. It isn’t fire and forget. That is, ‘I just give you the task and I don’t worry about it anymore. We’ve got to have some way to monitor the progress along the way without me getting in your way.’”

It can be hard t let go of work for several reasons: - We have to change the way we are used to working - We must put our trust in someone else and get comfortable with 'good enough' - We have to invest time in explaining how he task must be done - We have a natural desire to improve our own shortcomings so letting go of work we aren't good at can seem like failure. However, the benefits of delegation far exceed these potential blockers as long as it is done correctly.