Managers: It Pays to Learn How to Delegate
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
The goal of being a manager is to hire and train your replacement. Managers will not be able to get promoted without someone to take their place. Oh sure, you can get the promotion. But then you will have to do two jobs (while getting paid for one). Managers will be pulled in multiple directions until someone is hired. So, the best thing to do is develop your replacement.
Developing employees doesn’t make a manager dispensable. In fact, having a reputation for developing talent will make a manager indispensable. And if the manager doesn’t want to get promoted or move to another position, then the employee(s) they’ve been developing can take the job.
I’ve seen a lot – and I’m sure you have too – of seminars and articles that talk about being such a great manager that no employee wants to leave. Again, I’m not sure that’s the goal. Granted, we don’t want employees leaving because their manager is a failure. The goal is to encourage employee development and when employees are ready, the manager should support them moving into better roles.
But this means that managers need to learn how to delegate well. I like to think of delegation as understanding what things employees can:
- Just do it and never tell anyone about
- Do it and tell the manager later
- Immediately go to the manager for guidance.
Ideally, managers want to delegate to employees. This allows employees to learn. It also frees up the manager to work on more employee development.
For managers to delegate well, they need to have two things:
- A good working relationship with the employee and
- An accurate understanding of the employee’s performance and capabilities.
Managers want to delegate when they know that the employee is capable of doing the work. Plus, the employee is comfortable making decisions about the work or asking for guidance when necessary.
If an employee doesn’t know how to do the work, then delegating to them might make an employee feel like they’re being set up to fail. If an employee knows how to do the work but wouldn’t go to their manager for assistance if they needed it, then it’s possible that mistakes might happen (versus proactively addressing the matter).
The other thing to keep in mind is that delegating is not an all or nothing activity. A manager might delegate one task to an employee but not another. Maybe because the employee is still learning something. This is perfectly normal. The same is true for employees. A manager might delegate a task to one employee and not another. This could be because one employee has been with the company longer and has more historical knowledge to make decisions.
While my explanation of delegation might sound very easy, the truth is … delegation is hard. Both in terms of evaluating when / who / what to delegate and whether the manager is comfortable giving up control. There are managers who feel that if they control everything, then there won’t be any mistakes. Those managers are sometimes called micromanagers.
And getting back to the introduction of this article, micromanagers often don’t get promoted or asked to be on the CEO’s super-secret task force because they don’t have anyone who can manage the day-to-day of their department. Sometimes micromanagers get calls after hours, on weekends, and during their vacation because no one can do anything without checking-in first. You see where I’m going with this.
One of the reasons I wanted to talk about delegation is because of all the conversation these days about return to the office mandates. It’s important to remember that even with employees returning to the office, it’s still good for managers to learn how to delegate. Delegating well helps the manager achieve their own career goals. It also helps them develop their employees – which helps the individual employee and ultimately the organization.
Image captured by Sharlyn Lauby while exploring the streets of Las Vegas, NV