5 Reasons Why You Should Start to Delegate Tasks
First-time leaders tend to forget that the skill they use to get to this position — mentor, supervisor, head of X, or C level — is not the same skill required to lead. It takes sacrifices, patience, constantly fighting your ego, and a lot of humility to be a leader, a good one.
If you are currently in this kind of situation, be prepared, people set expectations for you as a leader and this is where the challenge begins.
A common mistake in being a first-time leader is trying to finish all the tasks by yourself. If you do this, you will become a Black Hole to your team, sucking all the tasks and trying hard to prove to your team or your superintendent that “you got this”, “don’t worry, you were not wrong to promote me, boss” or just simply taking it all because you can.
Think about it, whoever or whatever leader position you are at right now, you need to start delegating, here are the 5 reasons why :
Frees Up Time For Us to Work on the Bigger Picture
It gives us space to take a step or two back, see what’s going on in the team, in the project, finding if there’s room for improvement. Executing a task will suck a lot of energy and attention from you, it’s going to make you feel exhausted.
Not to mention there’s a huge chance you would be interrupted by meetings, mentorship, or the worst one: incident handling. Your mind will be fully occupied by those things. You are going to end up frustrated and finally burned out trying to keep up with it.
Meanwhile, your team will nag you and ask why they don’t get any assignments because you keep trying to take it all from them. Unconsciously, you have become a Black Hole for your team.
By delegating, you could work on other tasks, high-level reports, generating ideas, retrospectives, set up strategies for people development, or do an overview of the systems to prevent something bad from happening.
Opportunity to Develop Our People
Initially, when you start delegating tasks, you will feel how slow they are on finishing them. You keep convincing yourself that it should only take hours, not days. You will start to feel annoyed and impatient to take back the task and do it yourself.
It is normal to feel that way, it’s your ego working toward your brain, it’s not a bad thing to have. But it has to stop there. This is the room where you start building trust with your team, getting out of their way means you believe in them, trust that they can finish it with their own way.
If things start to stall, try to evaluate the way you delegate tasks. There might be some noise or missing pieces which make them not very clear or understand fully about the task at hand. The best way to find out and make sure if someone is in line with us is by asking them.
Try these questions and listen carefully to the answer :
- Do you know what I wanted you to do?
You need to know if they get it right or not. Before things go far ahead, you have to make sure that they have the same purpose as you. - Do you know how to do it?
Let them explain it. Don’t cut them up when they do something wrong or mention a strange process. Remember they are trying their best to finish the task using their own way, it could be slightly different from what you would’ve done.
They might not know how to do it effectively, they may take the longer route. Guide them through it. Point out the more effective and faster way to finish it and remember to explain why they have to skip some part of their original plan.
This is how your team comprehends things. By giving them trust and guidance when things shift out of the track.
Chance to Throw Down a Challenge
People love challenges, this is how you get people motivated. This is the place where they grow the desire to excel, a needs to be praised or exposed as a victor. It’s like a to-do list waiting to be checked. It creates aim, a sense of purpose, and urgency to complete it.
This is where they feel free to express themselves — make sure you get out of their way, they would display their expertise to win the challenge.
Some of them might want to gain recognition from others, from you as well their leader, or from the corporate to demonstrate that they are dependable. This is the desire for a feeling of importance.
Aside from making them feel important, engagement increase productivity and personal fulfillment, it also makes them feel well taken care of. All these will lead you to the power of employee engagement itself, which is employee retainment. If you want to retain your best employee, try to keep them engaged.
Making Use of The Expert
Admit it, you can’t master everything, there will always be a blind spot. Especially when you work in IT, the technology grows extremely fast. In every short span — months or even weeks — there will come a new major patch, new framework, new solutions. You will feel encumbered if you keep trying to grasp it all at once. That’s why you need to let the expert do it for you.
If you are an expert yourself or coming from a “deep-technical” person, there is a chance your ego would take over. It drives you to try to master it first before anyone else, this is all because your ego wants you to be acknowledged by your subordinates that you are competent, more expert than them. You would feel that your team suddenly becomes a threat to you when they are more advanced than you.
Remember, we hire an expert to help us, not somebody we need to show off to.
It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
— Steve Jobs
Asynchronous & Distributed Workload
With delegation you can make your workload asynchronous, people working in their own path with the same one destination. All you need to do is string up the puzzle pieces.
This also prevents bottleneck situations where single pipeline of getting things done is centered on you, it would make things slower to get done.
Give them the purpose, let them do their way, guide them the fastest way and effective way if you know how, other than that, get out of their way. This is how you build trust.
Also remember to give room for failures, sometimes when people do things in their own way they may fail. Major or small it’s just a matter of how well you manage the risk.
Be prepared for their failures, tell them where they got it wrong, and let them fix it. When things get done, it will make them feel proud and victorious.
Let them take the credit, cause we the leaders should eat last.
For first-time leaders, I hope this post helps you thrive in being a good leader, the effective one. For those who have been a leader for some time, let this post be your reminder, a little note to keep doing what’s right.
