Delegating tasks successfully frees up valuable time for you time, helps you to develop your people, enables your to better understand their strengths and weaknesses, and motivates members to perform. Poor delegation or a lack of it can slow work down, demotivate your team and cause negative conflict. Here are 4 Habits for Successful Delegation STL have identified as essential if you want to delegate the right way and build a productive and efficient team.
Involve the Team Early
Once you have your goal, great delegation is set up effectively by developing awareness, which lays the foundation for great performances amongst your team members. Most importantly, this comes down to communication. Follow this three-step process to kick-start the delegation process:
- Communicate your vision with your team.
- Deepen your vision by communicating long-term detail.
- Reinforce the importance of individual contribution.
Provide Reasons
Once you have established the importance of individual contributions, now is the time to reach out to those individual members are so important to the success of the initiative. If people understand the opportunity, why are they being asked to do something and why it matters they are more likely to buy in and focus their time on it. Therefore, rather than simply providing business context, share your reasons.
As one of the three modes of persuasion, logic is convincing because if you make a case for why you have identified a particular person for a job, they will understand your rational and see the request as genuine.
You will motivate them if you tell them why it matters to you.
Otherwise, doubt and suspicion can creep in, both of which impact on the levels of trust between you and your team.
Visualise Success
Setting clear expectations enables you and your team members to manoeuvre throughout the project. With vaguely defined goals, managers and subordinates lose focus, get frustrated and stressed because the reasons why things are going wrong are either deeply contentious or impossible to define.
When you are delegating a task:
- Explain the desired result in detail.
- Set clear expectations about what you envisage as successful outcomes.
- Explain how the task ties into the bigger picture.
- Provide criteria for measuring success: this should not only give team members of an unbiased way of looking at the result but also enables them to track their performance and make modifications, so they are best placed to deliver great results.
Confirm Understanding
Besides that, once you have explained clearly what is required it is vital to confirm the team member you are delegating to fully understands the request.
This will prevent a mismatch between what you have asked for and their interpretation, which almost inevitably results in frustration and conflict, but most importantly jeopardises the success delivery of the task.
In Summary…
Great delegation can help you achieve incredible things with your team. Laying a foundation through clear communication is essential. Sharing your vision with the team before you meet with individuals lays a strong foundation for success.
When you do meet with individuals providing reasons for involving them, setting clear and detailed expectations about the outcomes you envisage and getting them to confirm their understanding will limit risks, launch activities, monitor progress and achieve great results.