One of the responsibilities a manager is entrusted with is the power to delegate to his or her team. Delegating successfully as a manager, however, doesn’t just happen. Here are 4 tips that will help you in delegating successfully as a manager.
1. You must trust the team member you are delegating responsibility too. Giving someone responsibility when you aren’t sure they can handle it is just plain silly. When you are contemplating which tasks to delegate to which team members, consider each of their strengths and weakness.
Can they handle stress? Do they show up to work on time? Do they have organizational skill? Will you have to constantly hold their hand? Ask yourself these, and similar questions, answer them truthfully, and you will have less problems when delegating responsibility to your team.
2. Don’t hand over all of the responsibility to the team. While it may be tempting to hand over the entire reins to your team, this is never a wise move. You should always maintain some sort of responsibility. This shows your team that you’re willing to work for the goal just as you’re asking them to, and it shows upper management that you can do a good job of delegating successfully as a manager.
3. Don’t retain to much of the responsibility yourself. Part of delegating successfully as a manager is finding a happy balance between what responsibilities you keep and which ones you delegate to others. Some managers don’t want to let go of any of the responsibility. They reason that doing it all themselves ensures that it’s all getting done and it’s getting done correctly.
Not only will you come across as an egotistical know-it-all to your team, those you work for may view you as a solo player when what they want is a team player.
4. Learn from your achievement and failures. Let’s face it, delegating successfully as a manager isn’t something that comes without its challenges. You’ll be dealing with many different personalities who have many different belief systems and come from many different walks of life. There is no golden rule on delegating successfully as a manager.
You’ll have an ample number of successes and quite possibly the same amount of failures. Examine both and glean from them what you can. Look at why one technique turned out poorly and why another turned out successful. Delegating successfully as a manager takes time, effort and dedication. Invest all of these, and you’ll be delegating successfully a manager in no time flat.