“To delegate or not to delegate, that is the question.” I thought out loud, a week after watching the performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, adapted in Marathi. My friend joked, “You missed a calling. You should have become an actress!” I laughed. But it started an interesting discussion about delegation and got me thinking: if I write it down, maybe it will become clearer to me, and others can read and contribute to the discussion. The following is the result of that thought.
Delegation means assignment of a task, duty, or responsibility. So, the short answer is yes, delegate. If you can’t delegate, you can’t manage effectively- rather, you can’t manage at all. You will be stuck doing the same old job, or worse- your team’s job; never working on the new, challenging stuff. But which tasks do you delegate? How, and to whom? These questions haunt every new manager. Others get nightmares about ghosts and death; managers cower in their sleep, dreaming about delegation going wrong.
First things first:
Only delegating work you have mastered.
Now, mastery does not necessarily mean technical expertise. I am not an expert in MS excel, or international accounting standards. Those are methods, techniques. Mastery means to know what is the nature of work being delegated, what is expected, what are the steps involved, and understanding its broader purpose.
Mastery also means recognizing the difference between someone who is just talking big, and someone who is truly an expert. When you have worked on a similar project, or when you have closely observed other people do it, then you are ready to delegate it – but only to those who are competent, which takes us to the next point on the checklist.
Making sure you have a talented team
This is one of the most difficult asks from a manager, and by extension, from a leader. It calls for a separate article about hiring right. But even after hiring the right people, it is difficult to clearly define who are talented in which segments of work. Because in a business (or any collaborative activity), with multiple factors affecting performance, it isn’t possible to measure it objectively.
My friend (let’s call her Aparna) manages a small team, but she finds it difficult to judge others. This is an outcome of our national and global culture which judges people, (especially women) for judging others & being assertive about our opinions. Ironically, any critical judgement is automatically judged as being ‘judgmental’. So, Aparna is not able to evaluate her team without data. Instead of making a (careful) subjective judgement, she constantly tries to measure performance ‘objectively’.
Not all judgements are judgmental; in fact, some are necessary. As a manager, my job is to work with my team, spend time with them, and form an informed judgement about who is better at a particular task, and who isn’t. How can I delegate without knowing the strengths and weaknesses of my team? So before delegating, I check whether my team member has the required talent, knowledge, & experience to handle a new project, in addition to their current role.
Setting Expectations
But having a talented team is not enough, making my expectations clear to them is crucial – whether I am clear enough, assertive enough, and open to questions while setting expectations. But I also need to have internal expectations- my expectation from my team, which I don’t tell them: I should expect them to perform the task only 60 to 70 % as well as what I am capable of doing.
I have to accept that it won’t be at 100%. Naturally, my mind compares my team’s delivery to my own capability. But that can be fatal. My job as a manager is to get seventy percent from everyone, not just hundred percent from one person. Even if you have only two people in your team, the benefits of this strategy become obvious with simple math.
The performance of the team as a whole will suffer, if I spend all my time making sure that one project is at 100%. And when I see that my (unrealistic) expectations are not being met, I will jump in and take over the project. This can be problematic, as my team member may think I don’t trust them with the job anymore, and lose confidence; they may also begin to delegate their tasks upward, shirking responsibility. So, it’s important for me to have realistic expectations, and then trust my team member to deliver accordingly.
Zooming in and out
But trust does not mean blind faith. Delegating and forgetting about it until the deadline is a recipe for underperformance. What is needed from a manager, is to constantly run the loop of PDCA- plan, do, check, and act. Personally, I prefer to do it this way: Plan the project by discussing it with the team member, give them freedom to do the project (which means delegation), check regularly through reviews of the project, and act on the updates received on the project before planning the next steps.
In the ‘check’stage of PDCA, I can consider a number of different things. Whether the project is going as planned, whether the team member is on the right track, whether I need to review more frequently, or jump in and dothe project myself. This constant zooming in (going into detail and reviewing projects) and zooming out (giving the free hand to my team to complete the project and not interfering) is a balancing act, which allows a manager to nip problems in the bud.
To sum up, the better I am at hiring the right people, judging their capabilities, setting expectations, and balancing PDCA- zooming in and out of the project, the better my team will perform. This is easier said than done. If it were an exact science, economists would have solved the game a long time ago. Every situation is different, every context unique. We must exercise our own judgement when managing a team, & delegating. But at least knowing what it is that we are doing, we can do it consciously, and learn from our experience.
