Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
One of the main purposes of leadership is to get things done. We have a vision or goals that we want to meet so we motivate and inspire others who follow us and help us get where it is we’re trying to go. In most cases, the complexity of the leader’s job is such that there isn’t enough time in the day to do everything ourselves. This is why effective leaders need to be able to become effective delegators.
Delegation Isn’t Always Easy
Unfortunately, delegation seems to be one of the hardest skills for leaders to learn. Of the folks I’ve asked to take the time to critically reflect on their feelings about delegation, an overwhelming majority have expressed trouble being an effective delegator.
This really isn’t surprising if we think about it. In most organizations, those who get promoted into positions of leadership tend to be those who are the best at doing the work required, not necessarily the best at leading. Since those promoted are the “best” workers, it doesn’t take much to understand why when we move into a position where we are responsible for the overall work and not just our own, our first instinct is that “I do this work better than anyone else, so I’m going to have to do this work if I want it done right.”
It’s not unusual for leaders to get this superhuman complex where we think we can actually do the full-time work we had previously been doing AND the full-time work of the leader. Of course, this is just a recipe for disaster. We may be able to sustain this kind of pace in the short term, but over the long term it just won’t work. The only way we can get everything done that we need in this situation is to delegate. But there is a right way and a wrong way to delegate.
Bad Ways to Delegate
We all have certain parts of our job we don’t like to do, but they still have to be done. The best way to get the work done (and the least painful for us) is to have someone else do it. Having someone else do our monotonous and boring “crap work” allows us to work on the more creative “fun work”. This isn’t delegation, this is dumping work that we don’t want to do on someone else.
There are other times when we need the help of others with a more important and engaging task. So we delegate the work but we don’t have enough faith in those doing the job. Instead of allowing others to complete the work in the manner that works best for them we micromanage how the work is done. All in the name of making sure the job is done right. In the end, this doesn’t save us very much time because we end up spending so much of our time and energy making sure the work is done exactly how we would do it if we were doing it ourselves.
Sometimes we delegate work and the opposite happens. Instead of being overbearing and micromanaging how the work is done, we provide too little guidance on what it is we want as an outcome of the work. We provide our folks with what needs to be done, by when and we move on to the next thing fully expecting we’ll be delivered the result we have in our mind at the end of the task. However, it can be extremely frustrating to folks to spend time working on a project only to find at the last minute that key pieces of information were withheld (even inadvertently) or that the format of the project document needed to be something specific.
Followers so often see these unfavorable aspects of delegation and think badly about leaders. If all you see is delegation done this way, you start to hate seeing the boss come your way with a new project. This can also start to lead to a decrease in productivity, which in turn can reinforce a vicious cycle where the leader starts to feel they can’t delegate and get the needed results. Which in turn creates more reason to employ these bad delegation techniques.
Trying to be superhuman and doing all of the tasks that need to be done ourselves isn’t the answer because it just isn’t sustainable. But dumping our crap work on others, micromanaging their every move or ignoring them entirely as they do their work doesn’t work either.
There are ways to effectively delegate where it can become a win-win proposition. In a next post, I’ll talk about how to look at delegation so that it benefits the leader, followers and the organization.
Leader’s Reflection: In order to get all of the needed work completed, leaders have to be able to delegate. However, delegation needs to be more than dumping work that we don’t want to do on others, micromanaging every aspect of the work, or giving tasks without adequate instruction and supervision.
The “crap work” generally is done by an assistant who needs the “crap work” to begin the learning and growing process of becoming a leader who can delgate. The beauty of doing the “crap” work is if you have a leader who you can learn and follow by example.