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Summary

This week we explore how delegating isn’t just great for results, it also helps people to develop.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 159 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership.

Over the past few episodes we have been focusing on leadership practices - sets of skills that leaders apply to suit needs of people and the situation. This week we’re looking at Delegating. As we have explored before, people often struggle with delegation. Delegating takes time and effort. It is often faster in the short term to just do things ourselves. But it is over the longer-term that delegating has a major benefit. If there is something that takes you an hour per week to do, how much time would you be prepared to invest in training someone else up store take that task on? Let’s say it takes 8 hours to train them up. You will earn that time back six times over within the first 12 months. So from a personal efficiency perspective, delegation is great. But also think back over your career and when you have learned the most. Typically it’s when someone has delegating something meaningful to you that your learning was fast tracked. The risk we often fall into is delegating a task rather than an accountability. The problem with delegating a task is that I need to re-delegate it every time the need comes up. Delegating an accountability allows the person to take the responsibility and run with it. It also allows them to complete the task in their own way, which often leads to even better performance. 

Delegating works best once we’ve laid the groundwork through reflecting, inspiring, developing and connecting. People are then in a position to take on broader responsibilities, knowing the context they’re working in and the support available. Delegating makes sense with capable people who have potential to deliver even more. But delegation isn’t always the right approach. We should be careful delegating a task with high risk to people who are brand new. Equally, there are tasks such as performance management and financial approvals that only the leader can undertake.

But the work of leader isn’t over once we’ve delegated, and that leads us on to the final leadership practice - clearing. We will cover that next week. Just a reminder to complete our brand new Leadership Practices Assessment. It’s completely free, and you will find a link to it in the show notes. Have a great week.

Access the Leadership Practices Assessment - https://leadership.today/lpa