How to delegate for Personal Development

Do you need to delegate to become a great leader? 

If you find delegation difficult, putting your trust in others can be a challenge. 

Our 4 step plan to learning to delegate will help you better understand why you may have previously resisted delegation. 

We discuss how delegation will strengthen your workforce and open opportunities for your own career once your delegation plans are firmly in place.​

How does delegating tasks ease workloads, help you be more efficient and empower your team?

Read our top tips on how to delegate in our new blog post now. 

How to delegate

​Why Delegate?
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Delegation is a skill which once learned can and should, be constantly improved upon. If your team's success starts and ends with your own capabilities you may find yourself in a bottleneck situation. 

The advantages of delegation are:

• ​empowerment through showing trust in another
• increased efficiency and productivity

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If your skills lean more towards creative tasks but as a manager you find yourself in a mundane routine task situation you may not perform well in this role. 

​Your experience and knowledge would be better placed in other areas but you are already stretched beyond your limits completing the important mundane tasks. 

For a small business owner this could be completing their tax returns, filing their accounts or bidding for government tenders. 

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​Four Step Plan for Delegation Success
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​Step One – Questioning
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​“You can do anything, but you can’t do everything”
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​Take this opportunity to discover why you want or need to delegate work to other people and why you've previously found delegation difficult.

Do you have the mentality that no one can be trusted to do your work better than yourself. Do you fear your employees know more than you? 

Often it's the people who work around us who make us look the most polished and in control.

​​Taking responsibility for the success of your team and learning to let go of routine tasks, putting your trust in the ability of your people, means you can focus on the work you find the most enriching.

Take a step back, who would you like to emulate as a leader? Question why you admire them so? Make this person as your inspiration. 
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​Step Two – Preparing
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“Delegate, automate, eliminate”
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By creating a hierarchy of delegation and focusing on your own tasks and those tasks you want to delegate you can start to group together and organise the routine tasks which must be done daily, weekly or monthly and delegate the responsibility for getting these tasks completed. 

This is your opportunity to separate the work you want to delegate from the work you wish to dedicate more of your own time to.
 
Focus on what your role in the business should entail and ask yourself: What is the best way for me to spend my time? What parts of the business do I want to focus my efforts towards? What aspects of my current job do I find the most tedious?

Pinpoint the tasks which are consuming too much time, these are quite literally your ‘time-wasters’.

Group together as many time-wasting processes as possible and plan to streamline the processes, or ideally delegate the streamlining task to someone else!

​Step Three – Developing
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​“Together everyone achieves more”
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This is your opportunity to cultivate the successful alignment of your team’s co-operation in your delegating needs whilst consequently feeding their own drive and ambition.

​The achievement of your team’s personal and business success will also lead to your own success in leadership.

Build the solid foundations, ask questions when deciding which employees you should delegate work to. All tasks will require different skillsets so lots of factors should be taken into consideration. Some of the questions you ask are:

• Who can I trust to get this job done?
• Who will follow through?
• Who is the most passionate for this type of work?
• Who is the most qualified or experienced?
• Who works best with the least guidance?

Get to really know your team. Discover their strengths and weaknesses, where does their passion lie. Uncover their true potential.

​Invest in your workforce when training will increase productivity and build on their skillsets. Employees who show aptitude, passion or a general interest in specified areas they have no prior knowledge in should be encouraged. 

Expand your knowledge of your teams capabilities. Likewise, avoid delegating too much work to the one person you trust the most, meaning they feel overwhelmed and resentful, often comparing their workloads to those of others, who are less reliable. 

​Step Four – Actioning
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“Do less. Lead more”
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The key to successful delegation is to be clear from the outset:

• what the task is
  
• what the purpose is,
• how you want the task completing 
• when you want the task completed by

Give feedback after tasks have been completed. Publicly thank and praise your team if they succeed, and offer constructive criticism if the fail, consistency is key!
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Ask your team for feedback. Remember that great delegation is about consistency in learning in order to improve and experience will allow you the opportunity to adjust the way you put delegation into practice.

This is the time to trust your team. Provide them with an opportunity to deliver the ask.

But don't take your eye off the ball completely, be pro-active and avoid any gaps in communication which can lead to mistakes or misunderstandings.
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​About the Author 

​Naomi Clews is a successful manager of procurement teams and leads the procurement consulting team at Millennial Procurement, providers of professional procurement consulting services. Visit our website now for more great blogs and top tips from www.millennialprocurement.com