Tips to start delegating
Without any doubt, delegating is one of the most powerful tools for tech leaders. As someone said, with great power comes great responsibility, and this situation is not different.
Delegating consists of assigning tasks you could do on your own to other in the team, so you can focus on more important tasks. The issue here is that you are still responsible for the outcome of the task you are delegating. It means if something goes wrong, it’s your fault. And this is the reason because delegating effectively is so difficult and so many people micromanage and have fear of delegation.
At the beginning it could seem overwhelming but when you realize you can control everything and empower your team by doing a couple of things, then you see how powerful delegating is.
This is why I want to explain what are, in my opinion, the key things you should take into account when you start delegating.
0.- Select the correct tasks
Before going further you need to identify what kind of tasks you can delegate. It could be obvious but sometimes is not.
The theory said you should delegate urgent but not important tasks. I completely agree with it, but I will add something else: you need to know something on how to do the task and the outcomes you expect.
As a thumb rule, I would advise don’t delegate anything you can’t explain and give advice on.
This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert on everything, you can start delegating part of projects even whole projects over time when you feel more comfortable delegating.
1.- Trust up front
When you are delegating you are assigning your tasks to other people. As said before, it means you are responsible for those tasks even if you’re not doing it yourself, and a lot of responsibility comes here…
This is why you need to trust people you are delegating to. But you won’t know if someone is the right person to do a certain task until it’s done, and this is the main reason you need to trust up front
You need to make some room for your team to do things their own way. I see the tasks like trees, there are many different trees in the forest and all of them work the same way.
Sometimes you need to jump into the unknown and delegate tasks to a team member for the first time. This is the most difficult situation for you and your colleague, you cannot control the situation as you wish and he wants to do his best even if he doesn’t know how to do it.
This is the reason you need to trust upfront and start delegating, there is no other option. You just need take some considerations to control the process, let’s see how to do it.
2.- Match tasks and profiles
First thing to keep in mind: not all tasks could be delegated to everyone in the team.
It doesn’t make sense to delegate advanced decisions about system architecture to junior developers and blame them when something goes wrong. The same way, it’s not a good idea to delegate silly tasks to very senior developers because they will feel non-productive.
So, you need to choose tasks that developers or managers are capable of and then improve the level over time. With this strategy you are delegating and mentoring at the same time.
3.- Set clear goals and expectations
After choosing the right task you need to set up clear goals and expectations. It sounds really difficult but it’s not.
Decision making it’s one of the managers most important tasks and communicating them is equally important. So, you need to take some time to define and describe what you expect from a particular task or project.
You need to keep in mind what goals you set and how you communicate them, adapting to the developer’s level. It’s important to challenge people when you set the goals for a task, for more senior developers you should give them room to make decisions, but for junior ones a mentoring approach with deeper information is more appropriate.
When doing it, you should set your goals at a higher level for more senior developers and managers without writing it down or even letting them set the goals for you. Regarding juniors, you need to be more detailed snd write everything down in the user history or task itself to keep everything as clear as possible.
4.- Create a follow up strategy
At this point you have made some room to trust the person you are delegating to, you choose the perfect task according to his profile and you set clear goals for the task. So, how can you ensure everything goes well?
Good question, of course delegating doesn’t mean to forget about the task, you need to verify the outcome by yourself to ensure a minimum quality.
At the beginning this seems to be the trickiest part because you need to create a supervision strategy without micromanaging your developers. Sounds difficult, but it is not. In my opinion this is the easiest part because you can rely on a plethora of project management methods to check how the tasks are going.
The best way is to use agile methodologies like scrum or kanban. They are easy to follow and by default they offer some checkpoints to review the status of tasks and some standards to create a tasks workflow.
Basically you can use dailies meetings, reviews, kanban boards, spring boards, etc. to follow up all tasks easily and to know when a problem arise.
5.- Fix any problem immediately
And last but not least, you need to know how and when to correct things when they are going wrong.
It’s very important to adopt a mentoring or coaching approach, because your ultimate goal of delegation is to empower others to take action and make decisions on your behalf.
I would recommend stepping on the problem as soon you see it. Don’t let people fail unless you feel they need to experience it. If you let people fail constantly you will delay the tasks and could create some stress and uncomfortable situations for the developer. So be careful with those approaches.
So how can you do it?
Good, first of all stepping in the problem doesn’t mean to reassign the task and blaming the developer. It means to help them as soon as possible.
You could approach with questions like: hey, how is going xxx? Or did you find any issue developing xxx?
Now you can start the conversation getting feedback and their opinion about the job done until now. Then you can go further in the conversation pointing out the most difficult parts of the task to know their approach and give some advice or highlight something missing, etc.
Mentoring when delegating is key because you can achieve a self-sufficient team as the time goes on, it means delegating will be easier over time.
If you find people that struggle with a task my advice is don’t micromanage but “microfollow”. You need to comprehend what things are more difficult for them to work on and to pick tasks better for them so they can improve in the future.
Conclusions
Delegating is a really difficult task and you should see it like a process to improve and not like a one time shoot. It requires both side to learn how to do it you and your team.
The most important tips to start delegating are:
- Select urgent but not important task under your domain of expertise
- Trust people you are delegating to
- Increase difficulty of tasks over time
- Explain expected outcomes in advance
- Create a natural strategy to follow up
- Stay alert to detect process failure and improve it
Finally, if you have the opportunity to delegate, do it right now. Practicing is the best way to overcome any fear and realize how powerful it is to delegate.
