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So many leaders say to me, “I try to delegate but somehow it never really works out.” I understand that. Delegation is actually a very difficult skill. For example, one of the leaders I work with at some point he wanted a competitive analysis of his environment around him. He gave it to the office manager and just said please do this competitive analysis with no guidance and no template, and sent her off. Now she was eager to do it. So she went around, and she asked all of the executives for their input and spun out this big project and kind of wasted a lot of time and brought it back to him. And it wasn’t really well done. It wasn’t in the right template. And also it didn’t really capture the things that he needed. So he was frustrated.
“See,” he told me, “I try to delegate it doesn’t work.” Of course not. Because the secret to delegation is to figure out the skills of the person that you are dealing with as matched to the thing that you are delegating.
The reason that people have trouble delegating is that delegation is hard. It is hard for everybody. I have seen even seasoned leaders have a lot of trouble knowing how much to manage and how much to leave alone when it comes to delegation.
So here’s, I wanna give you a few ideas about how to think about this. Number one, I think that a lot of managers think about their own style. I’m not a micromanager, right? Or I wanna make sure it’s done in a certain way. Now, don’t think about that ‘cause it’s not really about your style. It’s about the employee that you are dealing with. And so I want you to sort of step away from your own identity as a manager and instead go to number two: the employee.
Now I like to use Ken Blanchard’s model of will and skill. And whenever you’re delegating something — whether it’s a strategic plan; whether it’s organizing an important meeting; whether it’s doing something very tactical, like doing a report; whatever it is — when you think about the employee that you’re going to delegate it to, think about their will. Are they into it or like not so much? Think also about their skill. Have they done this many times before, and they’re very skilled at doing it? Or are they kind of uncomfortable ’cause they’ve never done it before? You’re going to of course manage them differently depending on where they fall on those paradigms.
Number three, this is really important, think to yourself, “What does ‘done’ look like? How are we both going to know that you have completed this task?” What I think is interesting is that people often don’t go through the trouble of really thinking through when it’s done. We’re both going to know because it might be the meeting has been created. We all buy into the strategic plan. Whatever it is, think about the elements that will let both of you know that it’s been completed. And that’s going to help you make sure that you’re communicating appropriately with your employee so that you both agree on success.
And then number four is to make sure that you manage them the way that we’ve just described. So they are super experienced and super into it. You can just go in once and just wait for done to happen. But if they’re maybe not so skilled or uncomfortable or not confident, you might wanna actually plan a couple of checkpoints along the way so that you and they know that they’re making progress. That way you’ll feel comfortable. Oh, it’s going okay. And your employee will feel more supported because they know they have time to check in with you and ask questions. So if you follow that framework overall that’s going to help you delegate much more successfully.