Erika Andersen outlines a four-step delegation framework: explain the why, break the task into parts, assess the person's skills for each part, and provide targeted support like coaching. She walks through handing off a quarterly report to an employee named Mary, showing how to match tasks to strengths and plan development where gaps exist.
You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you will get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.
Hello and welcome to the Proteus Leader Show. I'm thrilled to have a chance to talk with you again. One of the most challenging things about being a leader is sharing responsibility well, otherwise known as delegating. I've noticed that for many leaders, it's hard to give away any responsibility. They want to be involved in the details of every situation and make every decision. Other leaders go in the opposite direction. They happily let others do and decide all kinds of things and are then sometimes disappointed or angry when that doesn't go as they'd hoped. The art of good delegation is finding that sweet spot right in the middle where you give people responsibilities they're capable of fulfilling and provide just the support they need to be successful. And the cool thing is that when you delegate like this, everybody benefits. You're freed up to do higher-order work and build your profile in the organization. Your employees feel challenged and they grow. And the company benefits from having everybody get better and not having decisions get bottlenecked with you as the leader. So in the can-do spirit of the Proteus Leader Show, I want to share some practical ideas for improving your delegation. Here are 4 things that can help you start delegating better right now. First and foremost, make sure that you know and communicate the why of the responsibility you're delegating. That may be the most important clarity you can provide for people. Think beyond the task itself to the real purpose. Let's say, for instance, that for years you've prepared a quarterly report for senior management about your part of the business. It's become almost second nature for you. So, when you're telling your employee you want him or her to take this on, you might just say, I'd like you to start doing the quarterly report. Instead, go beyond that to the why. You might say, they use that report to quickly understand how our part of the business is doing, so it needs to be clear and simple while providing accurate insights into the most important elements of what's happening with us. Those couple of sentences of context, of purpose, will be really helpful to the person. Next, you need to get really clear about the key tasks to be done in the area you want to delegate. Sometimes when we've been doing something for a long time, we've forgotten all the things involved in doing it well. And so, if you're the sort of person who generally has a hard time delegating, your immediate thought might be, No one could ever do this as well as I do. On the other hand, if you're the kind of manager who's prone to over-delegating, you might think, oh, this is easy, anybody could do it. Odds are neither of those things is true. No matter which of them you may be thinking, you'll be able to be more objective about the responsibility you want to delegate if you can unpack it first into its component parts. So, for this example about the quarterly report, as you start to reflect on what you do to create it, You realize that you first gather the key data from a variety of people, which involves making sure they understand what's needed and the format you need it in, and letting them know if you need something different for a particular report or in a different format. Then, once you get the data, you have to notice and summarize important trends, especially relative to last quarter. Third, it's important that the final information be presented in a way that's visually appealing and easy to understand quickly. You don't want the CEO and her team to have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they're seeing. You've got a basic PowerPoint template you use, but you're always trying to tweak and improve it. Once you're clearer on the component parts of the responsibility you want to delegate, it's much easier to do the third thing I'm about to encourage, which is to think about the skill and experience levels of the person you want to delegate to how good he or she is now at doing each of the main things involved in completing this responsibility. Once you do that, you can figure out how best to support the person to succeed. So let's say that the person you've decided to delegate this report to is Mary. When you think about her, you immediately realize that she's great at the second thing, seeing patterns in data. That may be why you first thought of her as the best person on your team to delegate this to. You believe she'll be excellent at that part of preparing the report and won't need much support from you at all. She can just come to you if she has a question about a new pattern she's seeing. As for using and improving the PowerPoint template, you think she'll be pretty good at that. You've witnessed her PowerPoint skills. So you decide to simply safety net her by having her show you her proposed PowerPoint deck and getting feedback from you the first few times she does it. So she can get even better. The one place you think she's going to need quite a bit of help is on getting the data she needs in the way she needs it from the other people on your team. Mary's hesitant to make requests of others, and she doesn't much like giving feedback. If you can help her get better at these things, though, it will not only enable her to create this report well, it will make her a much stronger employee And eventually a stronger manager. You decide that you'll spend some time teaching her how to make requests and give feedback, including doing some role-playing with her, and that you'll encourage her to come to you if she has problems getting the data from people so you can problem-solve with her about how to approach them differently. You can see that by thinking through what the responsibility entails and then what the delegatee's skill and experience level is in each of the component parts, So you can figure out the kind of support he or she needs in each part, you're creating a powerful foundation for that person's success in accomplishing the goal. It's the best way I know to keep from over-delegating, which is basically just throwing the whole thing at the person and assuming they'll know what's involved and be great at all of it, or under-delegating, which means assuming that the other person can't do any of it well without your oversight and control. It helps you be, as I said at the beginning, in that sweet spot of giving the right amount of oversight and the right amount of autonomy. The last tip I want to give you is be patient. If you're honest with yourself, you'll probably realize it took you a while to get this responsibility right. I'm almost sure you didn't do it perfectly the first time. If you're providing learning support and oversight in the areas where the person needs There won't be any irretrievable mistakes. The first few times Mary creates the report, it will almost certainly require some input and course correction from you. But if you keep supporting her successes and teaching her what she needs to do differently to make things better, you and she will most likely come to the point where when she gives you the report, your only feedback is, this is great, Mary. Thanks so much for doing it. And then you might add, by the way, let's talk about you doing the yearly report as well. And maybe you and I can co-present it to the senior team. As I said earlier, with good delegation, you win, she wins, the company wins. Now, if you're interested in finding out more about how to improve your delegation skills, we have lots of other resources for you. There's a whole chapter on delegation in my book, Growing Great Employees. and a more condensed version of the model in Leading So People Will Follow. And you can also go to ProteusLeader.com/topics/delegating. There are resources about delegation there for you to read, to watch, to try. So thanks for being here with me. I hope you found this interesting and useful. Have a great life, and let's talk again soon.
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