Do You Delegate Or Do It?

An effective manager frees himself from the routine parts of his job by getting others to do them

ONE of the biggest frustrations of many managers is the lack of time to perform all of the work required of them in their role as a manager.

I have yet to meet a manager who does not have too much on his plate.

Think of delegation as nothing more than giving yourself the opportunity to spend more time in the vital areas of your job such as planning, organising, inspecting, coaching, innovating and developing people.

Why not take a serious look at how you are spending your time and what tasks you are involved in that can be delegated to someone else.

Track your use of time for a week, logging all of the repetitive activities, problem-solving routines, crisis management issues and routine stuff.

Ask yourself at the end of the week: Could someone else, or some other department, have done this? What did I not complete because of these actions?

I personally guarantee that you can free up at least an hour a day if you will find creative ways to delegate something, anything. Here are some suggestions:

Learn to let go

A weakness of poor managers is their inability or unwillingness to delegate tasks, responsibilities or outcomes.

To be an effective manager, you need to know what you can delegate, when you can delegate it and whom you can delegate it to. The role of a manager is not to do it but to get other people to do it.

Even self-employed business owners who have small staff strengths can delegate some tasks to someone else, such as sub-contractors, freelancers or temporary employees.

Learn to trust others

Why don’t managers delegate? There are three simple causes.

One, they don’t trust their employees.

Two, they think they can do it faster and easier themselves.

Three, they lose control when they give a task or responsibility to someone else.

Problem with delegation

There are three fundamental problems with delegation.

Managers delegate the methods, techniques, processes rather than the outcomes.

They delegate responsibility without giving the people the authority to use necessary resources to get the job done.

They delegate a task and then take it back.

In other words, they ask an employee or a group to do a task and then, before the person or group has completed it, they take it back and finish it themselves.

This does three things, none of which are healthy for the organisation:

• They have just invalidated the employee;
• They have de-motivated the employee; and
• They have sent a clear message that they do not trust the employee and that they could do the task better or faster.

Any of these will have a negative short- and long-term negative impact on performance and effectiveness.

The purpose of delegation is to train, teach, motivate employees and free up some of the manager’s time to work on the key tasks that he should be doing.

– Source: Straits Times/Asia News Network

Article by Tim Connor, a management trainer and author of the best-selling book on salesmanship, Soft Sell.