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Mark Murphy explains why delegation matters and offers one question to identify tasks worth handing off. Leaders who delegate give their team members growth opportunities instead of hoarding work.
Mark Murphy explains why delegation matters and offers one question to identify tasks worth handing off. Leaders who delegate give their team members growth opportunities instead of hoarding work.
Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, and I want to give you a quick tip to help you increase and improve how much work you are able to delegate to the people on your team. The reality is that most leaders could stand to do a lot more delegating, and if you do do more delegating, there are a lot of benefits, but two big benefits in particular stand out. Number 1, when you delegate work to people on your team, assuming that you're not giving them just the absolute worst tasks ever, but you're actually delegating to them important, meaningful work, they will learn and grow. The vast majority of people are not growing and learning nearly enough. And here's the kicker: when people say that they are always learning something new at work, they are literally 10 times more likely to say, "Working at this company inspires me to give my best effort." So the more your people learn and grow, the more engaged and inspired they become. The second thing though, is that when leaders delegate effectively, they tend to feel less stressed. They tend to feel more like, "You know what? I actually have enough time to get done everything I want to get done." They're not spending their days putting out fires and answering the same insipid question 10 times times over and over and over again, they're actually working on, you know, more strategic stuff that advances and grows their career. That's really where we want to be. That's two of the big reasons why delegating is so absolutely critical, and it's one of the most important skills a leader can learn. Now, here's the little trick that will help you get more comfortable and fluent with delegating, and it is this. Rather than thinking about delegating as giving something up, too many leaders think about delegating as I have to give up this task. And it can feel like a loss of identity. It feels like I don't wanna give anything up. Even if I don't like that thing, if you're asking me to give it up, I don't wanna give it up. Instead, don't think about it as giving something up. Instead, think about it as giving a benefit to someone on your team. And specifically what that means is, ask yourself the question, what's one activity I currently do that if I delegated this to an employee would actually compel them or inspire them to learn something new? So what's an activity that I do that if I delegated this to somebody on my team would help them grow and learn something new and better? Now, when you frame it like this, it does a couple of really important things. Number one is obviously letting go of some work that's on your plate, even though we don't want to think about it as letting go, we want to think about it as giving a benefit to somebody else. When we do that, it actually gets the people on our team to learn and grow. Number two is when you think about it in these terms, what's an activity that if I delegated it would inspire somebody on my team, would compel them to learn something new? Pretty much guarantees that you're not giving them the absolute worst activity. This isn't the, hey, who wants to go clean the bathroom activity? This is the, okay, well, maybe come and sit with me while we're going through some of the invoices. Maybe come learn this new technology with me. Maybe learn how to write this report. If you learn how to write it, then I don't have to write it anymore, but you're gonna learn how to write these reports. Whatever the thing is, when you think about it in more positive terms like this, It pretty much assures that your insurers that you're not giving them the worst activity. And then of course, as you do this, you don't just sit there with empty time on your schedule going, well, I don't have anything to do. I'm irrelevant. What am I supposed to do? I mean, yes, you know, maybe don't work 16-hour days. This will reduce your workload a bit. But also think about if I move this one activity over here to somebody else, what's a really value-adding activity? Something I love to do that I haven't I haven't gotten a chance to do yet, that I could instead spend my time doing that thing. Hope you found this tip useful. If you're interested in learning more and working with Leadership IQ, talk to us, reach out, hit the contact form on our website, talk to us about our live onsite training, having me come to your organization, talk to us about our library of leadership masterclasses, or even our 4 and 6-week courses that you can attend.
