Do you find yourself checking your sales team's letters for punctuation when you should be building a business plan? Do you spend more time listening to your assistant's telephone conversations than doing your own job? Would you consider scrutinizing an employee's work as a form of "mentoring"? If so, repeat this mantra 10 times before reading the next paragraph: Don't Do It--Delegate It!
Whether you run your own business, lead a department on the job, or occupy the lowest rung on the corporate ladder, this philosophy will help you. Believe it or not, you'll get more done in less time, and with less stress.
Perils of the Delegation-Impaired
Is your refusal to delegate a essentially victimless crime? Think again. Poor delegators run some very real risks. If you take care of everything from fixing the copy machine to running client meetings, you'll burn out long before you can say, "I'll take care of it myself."
Even if you're on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder, you can still delegate.
Your subordinates or employees will have no room to advance because you refuse to relinquish responsibilities. The resentment that employees feel when they're not given free reign to do their own work results in high turnover. Lisa Kanarek, author of 101 Home Office Success Secrets (Career Press, 2000), knows that the top complaint among assistants is that they don't have enough to do. Or, what's worse, they're assigned only menial tasks that don't use their skills.
Becoming mired in the less important tasks of your position leaves you with little energy to do the vital parts of your job. "If you teach someone to take on a task," Kanarek explains, "it will leave you free to do the things you should be doing--things that need your expertise more than typing a letter or making phone calls that an assistant could make," explains Kanarek.
Learning to Let Go
You probably have many reasons for not delegating day-to-day tasks. As a business owner, you may not have the money to hire skilled employees. As an employee, you might think you're the only one who can do things right. Or maybe you're devoted to your clients, who want your work and not the work of some minimum-wage underling. But no matter how good these reasons sound, they don't justify the long-term harm that comes from not delegating. And you can follow a few simple steps to become a master delegator.
You must first decide what to delegate. So says DeAnne Rosenberg, a veteran management consultant and author of A Manager's Guide to Hiring the Best Person For Every Job (John Wiley & Sons, 2000). Some top choices for delegation are tasks that you hate doing; tasks that are highly time consuming; tasks you're not entirely familiar with; tasks that occur at least once a month; and tasks you know best. What's the reason for that last one? Because, as resident expert, you're in the best position to teach the task to someone else. According to Rosenberg, your path to delegation Nirvana has four levels. The time frame given the following example is designed for a monthly task--tasks occurring more often may have an accelerated schedule.
The Delegation Process
Level 1: Explain the task, discuss the pros and cons of alternative task solutions, outline the exact results you desire, and answer any questions. You should also establish a few checkpoints. For example, ask the employee who performs the task to check in with you every Tuesday.
Level 2: The next month, explain the task again and ask the employee to organize an action plan. Approve the plan and establish new checkpoints. You may want to remain at Level 2 for up to three months.
Level 3: Establish longer intervals between checkpoints.
Level 4: Let the employee completely take over the task and eliminate checkpoints. At this point, you should be 100 percent certain that the employee can do the job.
You should always ask the delegatee to repeat your instructions. When Kanarek's own assistant was having trouble with delegated tasks, she asked her to repeat certain instructions. "After she told me what she understood," Kanarek recalls, "I realized I didn't explain it right. That's something that was hard to admit."
If you're in a hiring position, every cell in your cost-conscious brain may be telling you to hire cheap--but don't do it. You're not really spending money on an employee; instead, consider it investing in your business or career. Skilled employees free you up to do the things that generate more income for the business, and they are almost always worth every dollar spent.
Don't let your ego get in the way. Instead of thinking that you've lost a part of your job, take pride in the fact that you taught some administrative assistant to backup the computer files or send invoices. Even if you're on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder, you can still delegate. You can delegate to yourself by breaking a task into manageable pieces and scheduling the components--or you can delegate to someone at your level by trading tasks with him or her. The possibilities are endless.
Linda Formichelli writes from the comfort of her Massachusetts home with her husband, who's also a writer, and two giant cats. Her work has been published in more than 70 magazines, including Woman's Day, Redbook, Walking, Writer's Digest, and Business Start-Ups.
