Delegating is not a bad word. Many people feel that if they delegate their work, things will not get done correctly. However, delegation is a process that is more art than science. You need to delegate some things to others and learn to let go to focus on other important things.
Here are some of the reasons why delegation is needed:
1. To get more done
2. To get people that are better at a certain tasks than you are
3. To magnify your efforts
4. To save time
5. Helps you as a leader
6. It builds trust and opens communication
7. It inspires employees and team members to perform better
8. It lets you focus on the essential tasks
Delegating is not something that one should feel bad about. I have delegated some tasks to my friend, Sam Morrison, and her team at Your Admin Ninja.
Fun fact: About my friend, Sam Morrison. She recently got married in Rio Frio. It was a lovely ceremony on the river! Yes, they actually hold the ceremony on the river! The ministers, her father, and her relationship coach gave inspirational speeches about love. We also got to celebrate with them one of the most special days.
Some tasks they help me with are social media, Thank yous, cleaning up my email, creating images, and managing some of my social accounts to help me expand my business.
Delegating helps you by focusing on the correct tasks and having time to learn more about what you want to focus on.
Delegating these tasks has helped me by keeping me focused on my bigger goals, special projects, taking ideas that I have for Timely Topics and fleshing them out, etc.
Ford Taylor talks about some steps that we may take to delegate. He calls it the VSTTEELE model:
Vision - See what you want to accomplish in the future, write out the steps, figure out the right person, and communicate the vision to yourself, the person you're training, and anyone else that needs to know
Serve - A good leader makes sure that he picked the right people for the right role and have given them the right tools to accomplish the vision. The three following steps of the model are part of serving. Yet, these get overlooked most of the time.
- Teach - Being a leader is also giving your team the process and tools to make sure they can succeed in their role.
- Train - A good leader not only teaches the process but also makes sure that they know how to do it before letting them do it on their own. Watch them do the process you teach and correct them if it is needed.
- Equip - Make sure they have access, tools, processes, or anything they may need to achieve in their job
Empower - If they have a suggestion to improve the process, empower them by trying it out. Listening to their feedback and making them feel comfortable enough to make suggestions will help your team grow and may lead you to better ways of completing a task.
Let go - You don't own the process anymore, they do! Let them own it.
Evaluate - Your job as a leader is to evaluate the results and make sure they are in line with your Vision.
Delegating any task takes many steps: First, to identify the need to delegate a specific task. Second, to accept that you need to delegate and make peace with it. Third, identify the right people for that task. Fourth, delegate.
Sometimes, we think that identifying the person that will do the task, letting them know that we need them to perform the task from now on, and giving them the "tools" is the same as delegating. Then, we find ourselves wondering why that person could not achieve our vision goal if we had given them the tools.
Explaining them the goal we envision, accompanying them in their training, and empowering them is also part of delegating!
The process is almost as important as letting the task go. Sometimes, we have done all the steps and they are ready to go after being trained, but we fail to let go. The empowerment and training time we have given them will turn to nothing if we do not let go of the task.
After all, our job at the end of the day should be to evaluate their job and open the communication path to ensure that the task is done the best way possible.
Coach Dale
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