Building competency through delegation

Developing strong delegation skills is the key to scaling your influence. As a manager of people, you grew into your role as a leader by being great at being an individual contributor. American culture teaches the importance of being independent. From an early age teachers encourage you to do your work by yourselves, and you were frequently graded and rewarded based off your individual work and contributions. As you continued your life journey, you learned how you performed as an individual determined whether you made a sports team, become first chair in band, elected to student government, admitted into college, or hired by an organization. For this reason, you became wired to believe that the work you do as an individual, will define the success you have in life. As you progressed in your career, company cultures reinforced this belief through performance review processes, raises, bonuses and promotions that were based on individual performance. When employees shift from being individual contributors, into being supervisors it is important for them to shift their mindset from doers to leaders. In every leader’s journey a point comes when they are no longer able to do everything themselves and must begin to enlist others to fulfill the scope of the work. At that point, a leader’s success is based on their ability to attract, retain, and develop talent. Successful leaders surround themselves by great people and are effective at bringing out the best in the people they work with. There is no better way to develop talent, than to take the time to train people, set clear expectations for them, and give them to room to learn and grow.

As the leader your goal should be to only do the work that only you can do. The reason for this is partially economic. As the leader, you likely are the highest paid individual within your team. When you complete a task that someone else could complete, you raise the cost associated with the completion of that task. You also eliminate the opportunity for your employee to feel a sense of accomplishment from executing a task that aligns with their skill sets. When you delegate, you provided learning experience for employees which can help them to grow both in competence and confidence. Over time this growth helps to produce the leaders of the future. As employees’ confidence and competence grows, they can take on increasing complex challenges, which creates new potential for the organization.

Tapping into the energy, knowledge and strengths of others is another great reason to delegate. We all have different strengths, experiences and perspectives which influence the ideas we have and the outcomes we produce. By collaborating with others, you can leverage their strengths, while still having influence on outcomes. The key here is providing a vision of what you are asking someone else to do, and then giving them room to do it. When delegating, you want to make sure that the person that you select to work on the task has the information and capabilities necessary to execute to your expectation. You also want to be clear about the parameters of the assignment. The better you communicate your expectations upfront, the more likely you will be pleased with the outcome.

One of the benefits of delegating is it creates room for you to be more strategic as a leader. A leader’s role is to ensure execution of day-to-day activities, developing talent, and planning for the future. As the leader, you must be able to oscillate between zooming in on minute details and zooming out to see the big picture. The act of delegating reduces the amount of time you must spend in minute details, which frees you up to focus more holistically on the entire business. Holistic focus is critical because no single project defines the long-term success of an organization. You build success by delivering a series of positive strategic moves, which are greater than your strategic missteps. When leaders can accept imperfect progress, they will find that their organizations are able to do more and move faster. The pursuit of perfection often results in excessive energy and resources be allocated past the point of diminishing returns. Leaders make better decisions around what is the minimum acceptable level of execution when they can put the work in perspective of the overall company’s goals. This type of strategic thinking enables organizations to allocate the appropriate amount of time and resources to projects.

When you move into a leadership role, the expectation is for you to replicate the success you were able to deliver as an individual contributor across multiple people. The only sustainable way for you to do this is by developing those that you work with. Leaders that try to be superhuman by attempting to execute their strategic roles, in addition to the tactical work of their organization risk burnout and stagnating the growth of their teams. People learn best by doing and failure is the best teacher. Leaders that are willing to delegate work to others, create cultures of learning and development. In employee satisfaction surveys, lack of development and lack of career advancement opportunities are the two most cited reasons that people leave organizations. When you delegate effectively, you directly address these concerns by giving employees increased opportunities to develop, which overall will put them in a better position for career advancement. This in turn will help you to be a talent magnet to people both inside and outside of your organization who will want to work with you because they know that you are the type of leader that helps people to develop.

Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner and can be found on Linkedin or emailed at [email protected]

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