Improve Your Delegation Skills Faster
When it comes to delegation, practice really makes perfect, but fortunately, there are some tips and tricks along the way that can help you be more efficient at the task without dropping the ball or losing momentum. So today, I wanted to share with you three tips that I teach my business coaching clients on how to improve their delegation skills faster.
Consider Your Informational Needs
When it comes to delegation, the first thing you want to think about is your informational needs and learn how to concretely ask for them. Not everyone wants daily check-ins and updates. Some leaders just want a broad overview at key points within a project, while others may want weekly or daily updates. Your own informational needs are valid, but the key is to communicate those needs to your team so that they know what is expected of them throughout the delegation process. It's OK to ask for what you need, especially if it helps you be better at managing your own emotional behaviors to be a better leader and manager for them.
Have a Process for Holding Team Members Accountable
Another tip to better delegation starts with being clear on your expectations. Let's say you hand off a project to Claire. You need to let her know not only that she is responsible for the task at hand, but also when you require a follow-up and what exactly is needed to complete the task. Be very clear and make sure that the other team member knows, if they need clarification, to come to you sooner rather than later to stay on track.
Have a Follow Up System
The third tip to better delegation is to have a follow-up system. And ideally, you're going to make it visible to everyone on your team or group. This could be a project tool online that you share, or if you're a paper-based system, then maybe it's somewhere on the wall in a joint shared area that you have certain KPIs that are listed. Be consistent with your follow-up system to avoid any missteps or confusion.
Shrink Your Units of Accountability
And the last tip to being better at delegation is to shrink the units of accountability. Do you follow up in one day, one week, one month, one quarter, or at the end of the year? We would all probably agree that following up after a year is way too long of a unit of accountability for pretty much everybody. So you would at minimum want to have a quarterly unit of accountability, but for the majority of projects, it would be even less. And start off small: "Hey, Sheila, please do a draft of this and bring it back to me later on this afternoon. And we can go through it together."
If someone is really capable, I might say,
Hey Kim, once a month, I want to see where we stand on this project. So please give me the KPIs for this project with a broad overview of where we are. And as long as we stay within the boundaries that we've agreed upon that are showing green light, that's all I need. The moment we go from green light to yellow, or worse, red, I'm going to want you to be reporting on that number weekly. And if that number doesn't improve within two or three weeks, I'm probably going to need to see that number daily.
With these three tips and practice, you can start improving your delegation skills and taking more and more projects off your plate to make room for more high-value tasks.