What You Need To Know About Delegation

By Martin Haworth

As a manager, it's useful to understand what delegation is and how valuable it can be for you. In fact, any business is usually run by managers operating at various levels who all need to delegate authority and tasks to their team members, so that they themselves can handle more relevant activities.

The hallmark of a strong leader is that it requires learning to let go and being strong enough to put your faith in others to do things that you do not need to do on your own.

You must also appreciate that there is a right way to delegate things and a wrong way to delegate tasks. The wrong way will lead to failure, whilst the correct ways will ensure success.

The first thing that you need to understand is what the valuable means of delegating tasks to team members is. Most of us do not know where to start and so will struggle and even end up with having too much work to do by ourselves. Experience is however a great teacher and so by learning through trial and error methods you will soon get the hang of it. This in turn does mean having to practice delegating tasks regularly on a day-to-day basis.

It always pay to understand that you must be in agreement regarding the standards that you expect, in order to measure how successfully or otherwise the job has been completed. That said, obviously the standards that you require have to be attainable as well as realistic.

One vital thing you must do in order to delegate tasks or responsibilities, is make a list of activities that are worth delegating. Then you will need to find a team member who you feel is best suited to doing the job at hand. Once you have that person in mind, you must then meet with them and identify the objectives and then create a clear plan of action (which should be realistic).

Don't forget, be sure not to expect too much from the person to whom you are delegating the work the first time round. And you must always be on hand to help them should they run into difficulties.

Delegating tasks and responsibilities is something that you will be more effective with as you practice. Once you have learnt the fine art of delegating, you will soon find that you have more time on hand to devote to other and more important tasks.

At the same time you will find that your team of workers will also, once they get the hang of doing the things you have delegated to them, start becoming much more productive too, whilst enjoying these new challenges all the more.

The bottom line is that managers can use delegation as a means to resolve short-term activities, where they themselves need support. In fact, by delegating it is possible to create enough time to personally deal with more important tasks, improving effectiveness, whilst being more efficient in your work, whilst developing your people too.

Remember, the most vital part of your role is to ensure that your people understand the task requirements and expectations clearly. Then you are much more the likely to get valuable results, with rapidly developing members of your team. - 31963

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