To Be a Great Leader, You Have to Learn How to Delegate Well

One of the things that we all struggle with as leaders is delegation.?The problem is that delegation is not all or nothing. My view is there are shades of delegation, and specifically, I believe there are five levels of delegation that you need to be comfortable with as a leader.

Level one is saying, "Why don't you go investigate this topic, come back to me, we'll discuss it, and I'll decide what's going to happen."?So I partially delegated a task, at least the investigation component, but I reserve the right to make the decision.

The second level of delegation, you say, "Why don't you go investigate it, come up with what you'd like to do, and I'll give you a yes or no on what we're going to do." You can see that's a higher level of delegation because the obligation is now to come up with the solution and investigate the problem.

The third level of the delegation is really an opt-in/opt-out model. You would say, "Go investigate what's going on. Figure out what you'd like to do, send me a note on it and if I don't say anything, go ahead and do it." So it's basically, go ahead unless I say something. That's a much higher level of delegation than level one or level two.

Level four of delegation is saying, "Go do it, go investigate it, figure out what you want to do, do it, and after you've done it, let me know what you did". So now they are completely doing the job and just informing you of what they chose to do.

And the fifth and final level of delegation is to say, "It's all yours, and I don't need to know what you decide." We usually think of level five when we think of delegation, and that's OK when somebody's ready to take that level of responsibility. But when we've got a more junior employee or an extremely critical task, you don't want to go all the way to level five delegation. You might want to stop at level two or level three.?Only when you're fully comfortable that somebody can execute the job or that they're not going to sink the company would you go to level five.?So when you're delegating, practice the levels depending on the capability of the person and the criticality of the issue that you're delegating.