Are Your Delegation Techniques Helping or Hurting Your Team?

Delegation is a critical leadership skill, but are your delegation techniques helping or hurting your team? Running a successful business requires that your team is on board with the tasks that need to be completed. Through skillful delegation techniques, intrinsic motivation can become part of the execution. This will create the greatest outcomes possible! 

When done properly, delegation can empower your staff, increase productivity, and improve overall team performance. Poor delegation techniques can lead to confusion, frustration, and lower morale. Understanding the serve and limit of delegation to your staff, and exploring how you can delegate effectively to achieve desired outcomes, can create an outstanding team. 

The Serve of Delegation

Delegation can serve as a powerful tool to enhance productivity and efficiency and foster a positive work environment. By delegating tasks to your team, you can develop your team members, increase efficiency, and foster a positive work environment. 

Develop your team members: Delegating tasks can help your team members build new skills and gain valuable experience. This can help them grow professionally and prepare them for future roles within the organization.

Increasing efficiency: Delegating tasks can help each team member focus on the tasks that are most critical to their role.  When a team member is able to execute in their zone of genius, it benefits the entire company!  A system of delegation can be implemented to empower the team to take action. This ultimately serves the greater good of the company as a whole. 

Foster a positive work environment: When utilizing specific delegation techniques, team members will develop trust in the process and begin to recognize and value their own contributions to the company. This will naturally raise intrinsic motivation to not only take action but also value the work they are contributing. Collective intrinsic motivation will raise team morale and create a more positive work environment for everyone. 

The Limits of Delegation

Although there are clear benefits of delegation, like with all things, there are limits to consider as well. Bringing awareness to the limits creates an opportunity to establish a delegation system that really works for the entire company. Some of the limits of delegation include lack of control and miscommunication. 

Lack of control: The point of proper delegation is that micromanagement is no longer required. However, this is not an easy skill set to develop for some leaders! Releasing this control can actually have an incredibly powerful impact on the business as a whole. These delegation techniques can help with the integration of releasing control as well. 

Miscommunication: If you do not communicate clearly about what tasks you are delegating, who will be responsible for completing them, and what the desired outcomes are, miscommunication can occur. This can lead to confusion and frustration among your team members which limits productivity and overall morale.  

Delegation Techniques for Success

The truth is, there are a lot of different ways to delegate! To delegate successfully, it requires you to follow a few key steps. 

1. Identify the constraint: Before delegating a task, a specific constraint or issue that already exists must be clearly identified.

2. Define the desired result: Clearly define the desired outcome for the task that is being delegated. This ensures that the team member(s) to which the task is delegated understands the result they are working to create.  

3. Connect to core values: Connecting the task to the company’s core values takes the delegation process to a new level. This ensures that the team members executing the task understand the bigger picture of why this task is important. Collective intrinsic motivation is beneficial for the best possible outcome. 

4. Staff member selection and empowerment: Selecting a specific staff member to complete the task and communicating why they are the best person for the task is an important part of this delegation process. This empowers them to take action, and creates a feeling of pride and value in the unique skill sets they bring to the team.  

5. Set a deadline: Clear identification of the timeline and deadline for the task communicates a sense of urgency. Not all team members will have understand why deadlines are important, so this delegation process creates that urgency for them! This also helps team members plan and prioritize accordingly.  

6. Clear communication: Clear communication is a vital component of the delegation process. This is why the delegation technique uses this skill in every step. Clearly communicating all five parts leads to a successful delegation system in the company. 

Conclusion 

Delegation can be a powerful tool for leaders who want to empower their team members. It also increases productivity and efficiency and fosters a positive work environment. Understanding the serve and limit of a delegation system creates an opportunity to develop and integrate the system that works best for you and your company. This delegation technique provides a specific process that has been used for successful delegation in a multi-7-figure company. This company has been built on the core values of self-sovereignty and transparency. This creates open lines of communication for team motivation in the process. Taking this invaluable tool to your own company and implementing the steps will greatly improve your overall efficiency. For help getting this set up and flowing, schedule a call with Dr. Liz DeFinnis today.