There is rarely enough time to do everything that managers and supervisors have to do.

Your days are interrupted by meetings, phone calls, business lunches, and emergencies that force your attention from one matter to the other,  and many times, this leaves you with only a little bit of time to concentrate on the more classic functions of management.

Which are the following

• Make and Develop plans that will help the organization achieve its goals

• Manage and organize people and resources to support these plans

• Supervise and motivate people to work on the goals

• Monitor and control activities (budgeting, performance metrics, and other methods)

Focus on each of these important things is often impossible in the stress and chaos of day-to-day work. So that’s why it’s important to delegate so you can focus on your primary role.

What exactly is delegation in Management.

Is a process through which managers and supervisors assign formal authority, responsibility, and accountability for work activities to subordinates.

There are three important terms in this definition, and you should remember those: authority, responsibility, accountability.

Delegation is an important management skill. But why? In this section, I explain the 3 main reasons.

In this section, we are going to take a look at the reasons why people/managers/CEOs don't delegate more. Do you recognize some of these reasons within yourself?

How much do you delegate at the moment. How Comfortable are you with handing over tasks?

Let's take a short and fun quiz and let's see how well you do.

FIVE STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL DELEGATION

Once you've decided to you’re going to delegate more, you need a method, model, or a process for doing it well.

That is why I have made the 5 phase delegation process. The steps are simple and common-sense and offer practical tips for each step. Once you understand these steps and practice them you will start to master them.

The 5 phases are:

1. Analyze and Decide Which Tasks to Delegate

2. Choose the Right Person

3. Meet with the Person and Delegate the Task

4. Monitor and Give Feedback

5. Review Performance

In the upcoming sections, we are going to focus on Phase 1 of the delegation process and that is to Analyze and Decide Which Tasks to Delegate.

We’re going to look at How to Start Delegating Tasks Effectively also we will Define our Objective and Key Result areas (OKRs).

We’re going to use worksheets to look at your priorities at work.

I will also explain the Tasks that can be delegated but also Tasks You Should Never Delegate?

And towards the end, we will use a worksheet to analyze What tasks from your current workload you can delegate!

So, after I realized that I was holding myself back by doing everything myself in my new management role and I was not using my team enough I started to get myself ready to do things differently. I listed all the tasks and projects that I was working on, on a piece of paper.

But looking at this long list I wondered which tasks can I delegate, and which Can I not delegate. So where do I start?

Many of the problems in management come from taking action without thinking.

Success in management is usually the result of taking time to think before you act. And especially in the area of delegation, it’s important to think things through.

Your key result areas are those things that you absolutely, positively must do to fulfill your responsibilities and achieve your business goals and objectives. Let's take a look at how to define those.

I'm going to show you how to look at and work with this new worksheet, that will help you to become very aware of your Objectives, Key result areas, personal qualities, and priorities.

You are going to apply this new worksheet to your situation. Again this will help you to become more aware of your Objectives, Key result areas, personal qualities, and priorities.

Now that you know what your goals and priorities are, we can start to look at tasks that can be delegated.  The starting point of delegation is for you to take some time to think about your daily work and your tasks before you do anything else.

In this module, I’ll guide you through some information and exercises to help you decide what tasks you can or cannot delegate.

There are a few essential management activities that should stay with you and never be delegated to others. Let's take a look at those tasks.

In this section, I will introduce a worksheet that helps you collect and analyze which task you have to Delegate, Prioritize or Eliminate.

In this section, you are going to apply what you have learnt to your own situation. You have already looked at this worksheet that helps you collect and analyze which task you have to Delegate, Prioritize or Eliminate. Now you are going to use it!

Adapt your approach to the needs of your Employees and your Workplace.

A word of advice on how to interpret the provided information.

In this course, you will find many processes, models, and strategies that are focused on YOU becoming a better manager. Everything that is explained in the course is from the manager's perspective.

I hope that this does not give you the impression that it is all about the manager and that the employee is just is an inferior part of your management process.

The employees are very much at the center of most things you do, and you have to be flexible to adapt to the needs of the organization and the employees.

But to become more flexible we need to first start with an understanding of the fundamentals. And this course will give you these fundamentals. After having acquired these fundamentals you will be able to become more flexible and creative and virtuous in how you apply these processes and techniques in less traditional situations.

It’s like for example cooking, in the beginning, you exactly follow your recipe into the smallest details. It’s a step-by-step process. But once you know the recipe and you are a good cook it is easier to deviate from the recipe and at the same time be flexible and effective and create a good dish. That is how management is too.

So, adapt the techniques you learn here to the needs of your workplace. If your workplace is more traditional organized, you can follow the processes step by step. If your workplace is organized in an Agile manner and you have to give more attention to teamwork, collaboration, and flexibility you will cherry-pick parts of the process as you need them when you need them.

Okay, now that we understand the tasks, we can delegate we’re going to Phase 2 and that is to choose the Right Person to give a delegated task to.

In the next section, I will tell you a personal story about a Delegation that went wrong.

We will specifically look at the criteria to use when Choosing Who to Delegate To.

Of course, we will practice this with A Mini Case Study and you will use a worksheet and a practice exercise to look at your own personal situation.

Let me tell you another story about my delegation experience.

The experience was not so positive.  I found out something about my employee that I didn’t know before. So it’s very important to choose the right person for a task.

So let’s look at what things to consider when selecting a person for an assignment.

Your most valuable resources in business are the people assigned to you to get the job done. They are far more valuable than computers or office space.

Excellent managers are those who are capable of getting the highest quality performance from the people they manage.

Your job as a manager is to get the maximum return on the company’s investment in people.

Let’s take a closer look at the second phase of the delegating process:

Choosing the Right Person for work you can delegate.

To avoid a disappointing outcome, you must delegate to a person who:

1. Has time available

2. Is interested in the task

3. Has the capability and is reliable

4. Is close to the task, problem, or issue

5. Has potential benefit from the task

In this section, we are going to apply the things you have learnt to a mini case study.

We are going to look at a worksheet that you can use when you are choosing a person to delegate a  task to.

We have looked at the considerations you have to keep in mind when choosing a person to delegate a task. We’ve looked at the worksheet.  Using this worksheet as a guide, list three of your current subordinates.

Then, identify a task each could handle on the short term and analyze the considerations.

Now that you know which task to delegate, and you have selected a person to delegate to. The next step is to meet the person and communicate very precisely the how, what when, and why of the situation.  So in this third phase, we Meet with the Person and Delegate the Task.

I will first tell you a personal experience of a  Delegation that went wrong.

After that, we will look at the 6  Elements of an Effective Delegation

Of course, you will get a worksheet for this and we will do a Mini Case Study

After that, we will go deeper into the Delegation Communication Technique:  What and how to communicate when you delegate

Let me share with you a relatively straightforward example of a case where the communication for a delegated task went wrong.

What and how you communicate when you delegate is essential. So let’s take a look at what and how to communicate when you delegate a task.

Meet with the Person and Delegate the Task it is important that you effectively delegate a task to an employee. You have to make sure that you mention the following things:

1. Explain the big picture, show Personal Benefit and Provide Motivation

2. Explain the details

3. Discuss resource support

4. Give Authority and Decision-Making Power

5. Be clear about expected outcomes

6. Get agreement on deliverables, deadlines, and checkpoints

We have looked at the most important things you must communicate when delegating an assignment.  And how well you communicate this information to your subordinates will shape the outcome. To help you remember what you need to communicate, I’ve created a simple checklist.

Use it the next few times you prepare to delegate tasks. If you use this frequently before you know it, you'll be automatically communicating this information when delegating assignments.

We have looked at the worksheet with the most important things you must communicate when delegating an assignment.

Now we are going to apply this to this mini case study.

We have looked at the mini-case study. I have asked some questions there. In this video, I will explain my suggested answer for this case.

As mentioned before how well you communicate with your subordinates will shape the outcome.

To help you structure your communication I’ve created a simple conversation technique that you can use during your communication with your subordinate(s).

Now that we have delegated a selected task to a person of our choosing we are going into Phase 4 we have to look at the progress and address issues if necessary.

So we are going to take a look at How to Monitor Delegated Tasks and how to improve the Delegation Process with Feedback.

If a task is important enough to delegate, it is important enough to inspect.

Regular review is how you keep on top of the tasks that you have delegated. This doesn’t mean that you look over the person’s shoulder all the time.

Planned checkpoints are perfect opportunities to give feedback without seeming to micromanage.

With feedback, we mean the process in which the manager and the employee discuss possible ways to effectively work together to achieve organizational goals.

Feedback can either be informal oral communication or a formal report of performance appraisals, probation, etc.

Effective feedback in a workplace setting has several important characteristics.

• It is factual and descriptive, not judgmental.

• It focuses on changeable behavior.

• It is specific.

• It is soon after the event

• It is a two-way street.

We will look at a realistic Mini Case Study. You have to give feedback. What are you going to say?

In this section, you will find an easy-to-use Feedback preparation sheet. This will help you to make your feedback better.

During your follow-up meetings, you’re subordinate might consciously or unconsciously try to give work back to you.

So how to deal with this?

A  time management expert, wrote a famous Harvard Business Review article: Who’s Got the Monkey?” He wrote that “whoever is responsible for the next step in any task owns the task. No one else can take action until that person does that part of the job.”

Good after the fact evaluations make you become more effective at delegation.

We will also look at the 3 Most Important Evaluation Criteria for Delegated tasks and again, we will go over some worksheets and skill practice exercises.

Evaluation of the employees' performance is the final step in the delegation process.

Once the task is completed, you should objectively evaluate how well it was done. This can be done quickly and informally for small delegated tasks, or more formally for bigger assignments.

Evaluation takes time but it is time well spent, let's take a look.

As you do your evaluation, focus on results.

Your evaluation, most of all, should be based on facts collected through direct observation.

In most cases, you can limit your evaluation of delegated tasks to three main areas: Completeness, Timeliness, and Quality.

This worksheet will help you look at the evaluation phase in a disciplined and systematic way.

Rate the person's performance in the three dimensions.

You can also think about and write down:

• The person's observed strengths and weaknesses

• Areas in which future training or coaching may be needed

• Types of assignments this individual is capable of performing in the future

You should understand your people as well as possible in many different dimensions. This exercise will help you do that.

Think back of a completed and delegated task that didn’t go as well as expected use the evaluation sheet to analyze what you could have done better.

Unfortunately, there will always be some sort of a problem to deal with in the life of a manager. In this module, we will take a look at how to deal with Common Delegation Problems and Solutions.

Delegation always has some risk of a bad outcome, either because of failure on the employee's end, because of something you as a manager failed to do, or because of outside factors over which neither party has control.

You must be prepared for these and for the human behaviors that sometimes mess up your delegation process.

Delegation Problem: Refusal to accept

Employees are sometimes quite smart by saying “I'm really busy” so they don't get a delegated task from you.

If you then delegate it to more willing subordinates, you will fail to maintain fairness within the workgroup.

Let's look at how to deal with this.

Delegation Problem Little independence

Some employees are always willing to accept an extra task but sometimes they are failing to take responsibility for the work themselves and need a lot of support.

Delegation Problem Overcommitting

In every company, we have employees just who can't say no. When you're asking for a volunteer to take on a task and everyone keeps quiet this employee will many times step forward. 

However, you risk burning out this employee if you use them too often.

Delegation Problem Limited collaboration skills

Some employees need the collaboration of others in the organization, but they aren't doing so. What can be done?

Delegation Problem Inability to act & solve problems

You have just discovered that your subordinate is not a self-starter, and maybe not a problem solver. How to save the delegated task?

Delegation Problem MISCOMMUNICATION

In communicating several projects it's important to show which ones have the priority.

Delegation Problem Inability to carry out the task

If you delegate often enough, you too will screw up, even if you are very good at assigning tasks to others. And one of the main reasons is a failure to pick a person who can handle the job.

A person's inability to handle a job may have one or more causes:.

We’re going to look at a subordinate called Peter. Peter has a problem with a new role/project he has. How would you deal with this situation?

Like most of the things that managers and supervisors do, delegating skills can be developed through repeated practice.

In this final module, I challenge you to use the 10-day delegation implementation plan that will put you in this practice mode.

Here's how the Delegation Implementation plan works. For each of 10 days, use the checklist to help you to:

• Find an assignable task.

• Choose an appropriate person to take on that task.

• Write down the key points you should discuss when assigning the task.

• Reach an Agreement on a checkpoint at which you will monitor the person's progress and provide feedback, coaching, or whatever else is needed to ensure success.   

• Set a deadline for completion

If you delegate at least one job each day for 10 days, you will get into the habit of consciously looking for opportunities and following through.

Make and use this  worksheet "Delegation Implementation plan" for 10 days,

• Find an assignable task.

• Choose an appropriate person to take on that task.

• Write down the key points you should discuss when assigning the task.

• Reach Agreement on a checkpoint at which you will monitor the person's progress and provide feedback, coaching, or whatever else is needed to ensure success.   

• Set a deadline for completion

  
  

Objective, after-action self-evaluation is the key to improvement.

• What part of the delegation process did you do well?

• What could you have done better?

• Did you define and communicate the desired outcomes?

• Did you set up a mutually agreeable deadline and establish appropriate check-in points along the way?

• Were your quality, cost, and schedule requirements clear?

• Did you provide suitable resources and authority to the employee?

This Self-evaluation worksheet is the last part.

• What part of the delegation process did you do well?

• What could you have done better?

• Did you define and communicate the desired outcomes?

• Did you set up a mutually agreeable deadline and establish appropriate check-in points along the way?

• Were your quality, cost, and schedule requirements clear?

• Did you provide suitable resources and authority to the employee?

Think about these questions and enter your observations on the worksheet. 

Your ability to get results through others, and to delegate and supervise effectively, as much as anything else, will determine your success as a manager.

Investing in management training for yourself or your line managers can positively impact your business. Management skills training creates more effective managers in their roles, who can drive success within their teams.

By investing in and making management training a priority, you’ll improve your company's success and influence your wider team morale.

In this document, you will find the management courses that I currently offer. If you want to learn more about management and leadership, please take a look in the PDF.