Delegation Paper

DELEGATION PAPER

The ability to effectively delegate not only increases your productivity and provides you more time for strategic planning; it also helps staff members acquire new skills and expertise. You can improve your effectiveness by recognizing the types of projects that are best assigned to others, as well as those best handled by you. At first, you may find delegating duties a challenge. Giving instruction to others is a time- consuming process that can test your communication skills. Examine how your current tasks are aligned with the goals of your company. Evaluate your responsibilities and identify those non-essential tasks that could be passed on to other staff members. These can range form day-to-day obligations to projects you have put on hold due to a tight schedule. When delegating a project, be certain to make the employee aware of its scope and level of priority. This will help him or her understand it significance. Work with employees to set realistic deadlines for various stages of the assignment as well as standards for evaluating performance. To prevent misunderstandings, put this information in writing.

The point of management is to achieve the greatest amount of productivity with the limited resources at hand, all the while promoting a sense of harmony within the production environment. I know it is easier to take the heat for a personal failure than it is to take the heat for the failure of others. As manager, you take the heat either way. But, if it is a personal failure, one doesn't feel stupid for picking the wrong person to do a task. Everyone experiences events beyond their control, or a lack of authority (and/or resources) to do tasks for which they are responsible. Everybody has made poor decisions. Education is not a substitute for this.

The easiest way to make delegation work is to have a development plan for each team member. This plan will take the guess work out of which tasks to delegate to which person. Have a contingency plan if the person is struggling. Set a deadline to re-take or re assign the task is someone is trying but not succeeding. Have an oversight plan. Depending upon the task, person and nearest to a deadline, plan how much oversight to give. This also will be affected by your staff development plan. Delegation is really the flip side to staff development. If you want your staff to learn new things, you must give them new things to do.

Effective delegation is an important tool that some managers hesitate to use. This may result from inexperience with delegation particularly for a novice manager, a reluctance to release work one personally enjoys doing, or even an adherence to the old adage, If you want something done right, do it yourself." Here are eight basic guidelines to help you delegate more effectively:

1. Determine what you will delegate - you decide which task(s) you want to delegate. When you delegate, you give someone else one of your job tasks; but you maintain control and responsibility.

2. Clarify the results you want- Determine the results you consider necessary for successful completion of the task. If you expect use of a specific method to accomplish results, relate that to the employee at the beginning.

3. Clearly