My management students this week had to wrestle with the question of effective delegation. It’s probably something you struggle with too – I know I do. One student posted an interesting response:
I find that it is difficult to delegate anything to someone else!! I then end up working 80 plus hours a week and burned out...This of course does no one any good!! What can I do? My issue is TRUST and maybe PRIDE... I find it difficult to TRUST that someone else will do things the way I would. I am driven and aim for perfection...I expect the same from my co-workers and employees... To address the PRIDE issue...I feel like if I have to delegate a task, I have failed somehow… I know, I know...Got issues :( Guess the good news is that I am not 'managing' people right now, I am managing projects with sub-plans...So hopefully by the time I am given the opportunity to manage people, I will have the TRUST and PRIDE issues addressed... ANY SUGGESTIONS from my classmates that may help me with these struggles??
Well the TRUST issue is going to be one you have to wrestle with on your own, but maybe by tackling the PRIDE part, you can get some answers.
The PRIDE issue is one you can fix if you re-frame how you delegate. It's important to understand that people for the most part would like an opportunity to do more, to show their boss they are capable of more (and maybe get a raise out of the deal too!)
If you have some tasks that are important, yet not especially critical, you might want to use that as an opportunity to offer up a personal or professional growth opportunity. Let your people have a chance to excel, and I'll bet that over time, the TRUST issue may be less of an issue for you to deal with.
Delegation isn’t easy, trust me! I have a tendency to take too much on myself and then turn down offers of help, partly from pride, and partly because I am kind of picky about how I do certain things. The reward for this? Too many things to do and not nearly enough time. I’m a work in progress too, so maybe we can all help each other out as we try to figure out how to be better delegators!
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