Organizations across every industry are cutting management and support staff jobs. For all you remaining managers and leaders, your responsibilities are growing and no help is on the way. To keep up, you’ll need to delegate more work to your staff. Unfortunately, you can’t solve the problem by simply delegating tasks off the side of your desk. Your staff want to do work that’s rewarding, and the best staff won’t stay with you to do busy-work.
If you delegate tasks that don’t inspire your staff, they’ll feel unsatisfied, overworked and undervalued. Your best staff will leave, and you’ll be in a worse position than you were before. But if you don’t delegate and you try to do everything yourself, you’ll fall behind and the quality of your work will decline. Either of those circumstances will put your career growth and job security at risk.
The solution is to delegate tasks in a way that benefits both yourself and your employees. This article will show you how, by delegating the right tasks to the right employees at the right time. You’ll learn to delegate tasks in a way that inspires the individual, develops their skills, and strengthens trust and respect across your organization.
Delegate Tasks to the Right Employees
The most important part of delegation is picking the right person. When it comes to delegating tasks outside of their normal work, you can’t just expect them to roll up their sleeves and execute a top-down strategy. You need to pick someone who will be inspired by the work and capable of doing it. Get to know your employees’ interests and career goals, and try to delegate tasks to someone who’d appreciate the work. You’ll get better and more creative results faster if you can turn delegation into a mutually beneficial exercise.
Ask, Don’t Demand
This first step is about building a productive, trusting relationship with your staff. It’ll seem slower than just using your role power to get the job done, but this investment will make your job easier later on.
When you give an employee the opportunity to decline your request, you show respect for their time and the work they do. This shows that you consider their work to be important, and you value the contributions they make in their day-to-day role. Over time, this can build an employee’s feelings of pride and fulfillment at their job. Employees who feel fulfilled at work stay in their role longer, and actively work towards improving their abilities in their role.
Pick the Right Time to Delegate
The time you choose to delegate a task can be the difference between a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. It can also impact whether they do the job well or not.
When you try to delegate a task while your employee is preoccupied, you take a big risk. The employee might not fully understand your request, and since their mind is elsewhere, they probably won’t ask clarifying questions. They might not think of questions to ask, or they might refrain from asking pertinent questions so that they can get back to what they were doing. This means that they’ll either interrupt you with questions later, or worse, not ask and do it wrong. This wastes everyone’s time.
Instead, give your employee the option to decline your request, or talk about it later. That way, you can adjust your approach and follow up at a better time. By allowing employees to decline or defer, you’ll often get a more enthusiastic and engaged response when you follow-up. And by delegating tasks when an employee is in the right mindset, you can leverage the full potential of their abilities.
Why Shouldn’t You Demand?
This is a tough pill to swallow for many managers, especially those with old-school values. When it comes to delegating tasks, it’s common for managers to say things like “it’s in your job description”, “I’m paying you to work”, and “if you won’t do it, I can find someone who will.”
While they’re not wrong, it’s still a bad idea to operate like that in today’s workplaces. Here’s why:
Your Short-Term Gains Will Cost You in the Long-Run
It’s true that commanding someone to do a task ensures that it’ll get done. There’s almost no risk that they’ll say ‘no’ unless they are willing to risk getting fired. Unfortunately, your short-term results will come at the cost of sustainable high-quality results. This is because ‘demands’ take away an employee’s sense of ownership and responsibility for their job. They’ll lose their pride, sense of responsibility, and connection to the organization. They’ll wait for you to delegate tasks to them, rather than proactively looking for ways to improve the business. This means more work for you and less productivity from them.
Further, your use of role-power will damage your relationship and make it hard to build trust later on. Employees will make assumptions about your motives, and any praise you give will look like a patronizing attempt to make up for your earlier abuses of role-power.
It’ll Become Harder to Offer Voluntary Tasks
If you delegate in the form of demands often, you’ll train employees to see all requests by you as mandatory, even when they aren’t. For example, if at some point you do want to make an optional request (like requesting a volunteer), you won’t be able to. Even when you say it’s optional, they’ll consider what they know about your management style, and try to avoid risk. They’ll make assumptions about how you might interpret a response like “sorry, now is not the best time”. Without trust, your employees will be afraid to decline any request by you, lest they come off as a ‘bad team player’.
Employees Will Drop Important Work to Fulfill Your Demands
Not only will you potentially have them committing to do something while their mind is distracted, but you may also be interrupting a productive workflow. This means that by making a demand, you could damage the effective completion of two tasks: the one you are trying to delegate, and the one they were currently working on.
You’ll Reduce Productivity and Increase Stress
In accounting, there is something called ‘set-up time’, which refers to the time it takes to prepare to start a task. Every time you stop working, you need to ‘set-up’ again.
There’s both a physical startup time (starting your computer, collecting notes, opening software, etc) and a mental startup time. It takes time to get our minds right before starting a task, and when we get interrupted, we need to go through that mental process again. So, in your effort to get more done, you’ll interrupt a productive workflow. Your demand will put two tasks at risk: the one you are trying to delegate, and the one they were currently working on.
And since you won’t have built trust with your employee, they’ll be afraid to let you know when they’re overwhelmed. Your best-case scenario is that you find out they’re overwhelmed after they miss a deadline. Your worst-case scenario is that they burn-out and take stress-leave or quit.
You’ll Increase Turnover
It’s scientifically proven that over-demanding managers contribute to high turnover. Turnover issues can be a death knell to organizational effectiveness.
Instead of driving the organization forward, you’ll be busy onboarding staff (something you cannot delegate!). You’ll underperform for months while you replace the experienced and competent staff who left, and it’ll be your fault.
You can’t control natural attrition like retirements, and you should be happy when staff leave for promotions. What you don’t want are good employees making lateral job-changes because they just don’t want to work for you.
What Do You Do When an Employee Always Says No?
Find out why they said ‘no’, and find ways to get a ‘yes’ next time.
You need to delegate work, so you need to avoid training your employees to say ‘no’ just to avoid work. You need to make it clear that when you accept a ‘no’, it’s because you trust and respect them, not because you’re a pushover.
So how do you do this? Well, the way you handle this is going to be personal to you, but here’s how I’d handle the conversation:
Me: “Hi Pete, I’m putting together a report and I need help collecting some data. In your development plan, it says you want to build your analytical skills, and this task will help with that. Is this something you’re willing to help me with today?”
Pete: “Sorry Chris, I don’t think I’m able to help you with that today, my schedule’s packed.”
Me: “Okay Pete, I understand, that’s no problem. It sounds like you are pretty busy today. Do you have everything you need over here?”
Pete: “I do, thanks.”
Chris: “Great, see ya.”
Afterward, I’d make a note that Pete was too busy to take on work that directly supports his goals, so I’ll need to find out more about his workload. At his next weekly one-on-one meeting, I’d ask questions like this:
- “Walk me through a typical workday for you.”
- “Show me your to-do list for this week.”
- “Tell me how you prioritize your work; what’s your thought process?”
- “Show me how you track your schedule and tasks.”
With that information, I’d get the insights I need to provide feedback. I might find that he’s dedicating too much time to low-priority tasks. If Pete is a leader himself, I might find that he’s doing work that he should delegate. Managers often do this believing that they’re doing their staff a favor, but it actually damages staff morale.
In our next weekly one-on-one, I’d have Pete come up with ways to improve his time-management skills. I’d probably encourage him to prepare an Eisenhower grid to bring to our next one-on-one. If he leads a team, I’d encourage him to delegate three items from his to-do list and let me know how it goes. This benefits Pete because he’ll improve his time-management skills and free-up time to work on more important things. It benefits me because Pete will have more time to help me the next time I ask.
I’ll repeat this process until Pete’s able to handle his regular work, plus some extra project-work. If he keeps rejecting tasks that support his goals, I’d reopen discussions about his goals to make sure we’re focusing on the right things.
Be Proactive so you don’t have to delegate in the first place.
Teach, Test, Trust.
Early in my management career, I’d delegate tasks often, many times a day. Keeping track of all the requests I made was so time-consuming that I often thought I should just do the task myself. Unknown to me at the time, I was having to delegate so many things because I’d discouraged proactivity. Why would anyone proactively look for work when they knew I’d be delegating work to them? It was smarter for them to wait for me to delegate tasks to them, rather than risk overstretching themselves.
Fortunately, I had a mentor who taught me that I was wasting my time and the potential of my employees. Instead, I needed to do just three things: show them how to do the job, make sure they can do it on their own, and hold them accountable for their results. They’d be free to do the job however they wanted, so long as they met expectations. He called it ‘teach, test, trust’, and it’s always stuck with me.
Have Weekly 1-on-1 Meetings with Employees
Most of my productivity comes from the weekly 30-minute 1-on-1 meetings I have with my employees. In these meetings, I always do the following:
- Follow-up on commitments made at our previous meeting (both from myself, and from them)
- Get a summary of what they’ll be working on between now and our next meeting
- Offer feedback to support their work for the following week. Depending on the skills and abilities of the individual, I’d offer guidance around priorities, share some tips, and talk about their development plan
After the meeting, the employee and I both leave with a good understanding of what the following week will yield. And since you’ll understand your employee’s workload, you’ll be in a good position to delegate work effectively. An interaction might go like this:
Me: “Hi Pete, I’m putting together a report and I need help collecting some data. In your development plan, you mention that you want to build your analytical skills, so I thought of you. Is this something you’re willing to help me with today?”
Pete: “Sorry Chris, I don’t think I’m able to help you with that today, my schedule’s packed.”
Me: “Okay Pete. I know you are working on (assignment x) this week. That’s an important assignment, but we don’t need it until the end of the month. If we take that off your agenda for this week, that would free up about 4 hours. In that case, would you be able to help me out?”
Pete: “Yeah, in that case, I could help.”
Chris: “Great, I’ll schedule in a brief meeting to discuss next steps. Thank you!”
Click here for the complete manager’s guide to 1-on-1 meetings.
Discuss the Priorities Constantly
If you’re a manager who communicates the priorities of the organization clearly and often, and you empower your employees to make good decisions, your employees will become proactive. Instead of you bargaining with them, they’ll bargain with you. You’ll ask Pete to help you with an assignment, and you’ll get a response like “I mentioned that I’d do (assignment x) this week, but since it’s not due until the end of the month, I can push that off until next week. Would that be alright?”. It’s a beautiful thing.
I find that the best way to establish and communicate priorities is through weekly or bi-weekly team meetings. In these meetings, you can develop a shared understanding of organizational priorities. Once your team has a good grasp on the ‘raison d’etre’ of the organization, you can work together to develop a vision and mission that’s specific to your team. Refer to your vision and mission often, and over time, your staff will start making good decisions proactively. This might sound too easy, but it really does happen this way.
Inspirational #Leadership is a huge abstract concept, but no one makes it real like Simon Sinek in his book ‘Start With Why’. My copy has so many post-it’s they’ve become meaningless.
— Chris (@ChrisjBergen) January 23, 2020
Every manager should read it at least once. Check it out: https://t.co/SN1TbjCTfQ #Leadership pic.twitter.com/ntowTxaR1o
Final Thoughts
In my first year as a manager, I often made demands in the form of questions like “How do you feel about doing x?”. My requests sounded optional, but they really weren’t. I thought good leaders never took ‘no’ for an answer, so that’s how I behaved. I thought people who said no had ‘attitude problems’, and they didn’t last long with me after that. I consider this one of my many ‘rookie-manager’ learning lessons.
So make sure your employees know you value honesty regarding their workload and their goals. Let them know you want the right work done well, rather than many things done poorly. If you’re proactive and set clear expectations, then in the rare times you really do need to make a demand, it’ll be taken very seriously.
I learned these lessons, but a lot of managers never do. If you’re taking over a new team, you should assume that their former manager communicated poorly and abused role power. They’ll expect the same from you until you’ve proven otherwise.
Thanks for reading!
