Done right, delegation isn’t just offloading tasks on others—it’s a path to leadership development, including for the person in charge.
Good leaders understand two frustrating things instinctively: They don’t know everything, and they can’t do everything.
Solving the first issue is straightforward: Build teams with knowledge and expertise, and call on them often. The second one is trickier. Leaders often want to be hands-on and struggle to delegate. Behaving that way means they know what’s happening at all times, but it sows distrust. Moreover, it keeps leaders from growing.
At Fast Company, Humaniz CEO Chris Giannos frames delegation as a form of professional development for leaders. Describing it as “reverse mentoring,” he writes that leaders can support their teams by hosting regular knowledge exchanges about new trends and strategies. “This fosters a culture of shared learning and mutual respect, allowing leaders to stay informed while empowering their teams to take ownership of their expertise,” Giannos writes.
Done right, delegation fosters a culture of shared learning and mutual respect.
Building trust across an organization is a noble goal, but achieving it can still be difficult: How much does a leader let go of, and how much monitoring is required? At Harvard Business Review, Rebecca Knight connected with a group of leadership experts, who suggest that resolving that challenge begins with leaders looking inside themselves to identify the root of their work-hoarding tendencies. You might be a micromanager, or a person determined to do everything alone. Regardless, knowing that should prompt you to ask, Knight writes, “What’s the real cost—not just to you, but to your team and the work?”
Once you’ve identified your own tendencies, from there it’s a matter of finding the people best equipped to take on tasks, she writes: “Who are your emerging leaders? Who has the interest, bandwidth, and talents for the task? Who needs to learn something new? And, of course: Who do you trust?” That helps you ease into delegation, and having trust from the start should prevent you from becoming a soul-killing micromanager—or at least too much of one.
It might help to think of delegation not as a specific skill, but something that exists on a spectrum. Writing at the Insead Business School website, Athena Chief Learning Officer Eliot Gattegno and professor Nadav Klein lay out a range of delegation roles for leaders to improve productivity, from task-based jobs to ones that address broader organizational goals. At the highest level, you’ve reached what they call “clairvoyant delegation,” the state where “you won’t need to delegate at all because the employee will understand your thinking process and goals so well that they can intuit what your requests might look like given the situation.”
That’s a good place to be, of course. But as with everything else in leadership, it won’t happen without intentionality and smaller steps along the way. Delegation is too often unstructured, which is part of the reason why leaders sometimes inadvertently sow confusion and resentment. “This lack of structure leads to a superficial view of the practice, where it is merely seen as something that leaders must do more of, somewhat similar to visiting the gym more regularly,” the Insead authors write. And just like hitting the gym, it helps to have a plan.
The post Why Delegating Makes for Better Leaders appeared first on Associations Now.
