In his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen Covey talks about the correct way to delegate to other people. If you delegate well, you will achieve a tremendous increase in your ability to deliver. If you take the wrong approach, you’ll end up putting out fires created by other people. Ignore the basics of good delegation at your peril!
The most powerful way to leverage your time is through delegation. As an individual, you only have 24 hours in any given day to create the results you want. By delegating responsibility for tasks to other people, you can increase the number of man-hours you track each day.
Delegation, particularly for people learning to manage other people, is often one of the hardest things to do well. If mismanaged, instead of creating more time, you will end up spending more time resolving crises created by other people or using your time ineffectively and inefficiently.
Stephen Covey identifies two main styles of delegating, to which I will add a third. In today’s sophisticated work environment, just one of these styles will produce the desired result of multiplying your effectiveness.
“Golfers Delegation”
In this style of delegation, you give the person detailed instructions for each task they need to do, including when and how to do the tasks. You end up telling them “go for this, go for that…” hence the name! You’ve probably come across someone like this: the micromanager who wants to know everything you’re doing and control every aspect of your work.
This style of delegation works up to a point. The micromanager may manage multiple people, all of whom may be performing specific tasks that, if properly coordinated, can lead to a greater result than any one person alone.
However, there are several limitations to this approach. The micromanager can only manage what they can control during the space of a business day. Your team has little room to contribute their own ideas and creative input. If properly managed, these inputs could deliver a much higher output.
This is often the first style of delegation that people adopt when they start supervising others. It is a simple extension of their approach to managing themselves.
Delegation by Abdication
I think the name tells you that this is not a good approach. This is often adopted by people who lack self-confidence, have had a bad experience with a micromanager, or don’t have a clear plan of what they want to achieve.
It is often confused with true stewardship delegation which we will discuss next, but it differs in several critical ways.
In this style, the manager tells his team more or less what he wants done and then leaves them to get down to business. Sounds good? Well, there are many potential problems:
Team members may not know what to do and end up doing their own thing.
Unless the people you delegate to are used to working in teams with each other over a long period of time, there is little chance that activities will be coordinated and produce consistent results.
There are no expectations of results so no one knows where it is going. They will get somewhere at some point, but there is no guarantee that they will produce anything useful or that they will do so in a reasonable amount of time.
Essentially, the person delegating has abdicated responsibility.
Delegation by stewardship
Stewardship delegation, as recommended in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” takes the best of the two methods you’ve read about so far and corrects their weaknesses. He doesn’t dictate the methods, he leaves them up to the person, but he focuses on delivering specific results.
This process begins with a clear vision of what is to be achieved at the end of the process. This can be a project goal or it can be a clear set of metrics that describe the outcome of a particular task.
The manager shares the vision with the person who is going to do the work and together they develop a plan and identify gaps in people’s knowledge. If the person doing the work is inexperienced, the manager may have to do a lot of this on their behalf.
The next step is to set the ground rules for the job: when it needs to be done, how you want progress to be reported, important things to avoid, any problems you can foresee, what resources are available…
Finally, the person must be given clear performance standards to be achieved and the consequences of both good and poor performance explained.
As the person carries out the work, you will encourage them to report on progress and problems and also to ask for help when needed. However, you will give them the freedom to carry out the task within the guidelines, as long as they meet the agreed objectives.
Stephen Covey defends the management delegation method in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” This method empowers his team members to achieve outstanding results while ensuring they stay focused on the big picture. It allows you to maximize the leverage you can achieve by delegating to other people.