Reframing How to Delegate

Delegation is often seen as a low-level management and productivity skill when in fact it’s also a higher management and leadership skill. How to Delegate is something even senior execs should know in order to help develop the people working for them. – InPower Editors

Delegation: It’s Not About You! via @DanaTheus on #InPower #Women” – Click to Tweet

The common management lingo, “how to delegate” has always bugged me. Why? Because we usually talk about delegation as though it’s something you do TO other people, not FOR them. When reframed correctly, delegation isn’t just a productivity skill you gain personally (which it is), it’s also a development skill you deploy to help others achieve greater value to the organization.

Here’s what I mean. The typical way we encounter the need to delegate comes when someone says, “I’m overwhelmed and can’t do all this.”

So we say, “Stop trying to be the hero and delegate some of this work to other people for goodness sake!”

This is a valid response to help someone be less overwhelmed.

Here’s an alternative approach.

“I’m overwhelmed!”

“Great! This is a great opportunity for you to take some leadership and decide who on the team needs to acquire some new skills, and it will let you focus on the new skills you’re developing, too!”

In the end, delegation is the sharing of workload, but the key distinction above is that the second approach goes for the win-win and development of greater capacity among the humans on the team. When you come at delegation through this frame, you make your choices about who gets what work more strategically.

This reframing doesn’t take away the extra work and brief duplication of effort involved in bringing someone else up to speed, but it does create an opportunity that the people being delegated to will see it as an opportunity to expand their skill set and value. They’ll be more likely to be more motivated to take on the new tasks.

This reframing also doesn’t fix anything if the true problem is that the workload and the resource availability are out of whack. Too much work is too much work. That’s another problem entirely and if people sense you’re trying to get them to do too much work under the guise of “development”, they’ll balk. So if what you need is a “work smarter, not harder” strategy, don’t mask it in a “development through delegation” strategy, or you’ll get a backlash.

Afraid that delegating too much makes you less valuable? When you frame it right it does exactly the opposite!

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