One of the most important skills you need to learn as an effective manager is to delegate effectively. If you don’t learn delegation skills for managers, you won’t be able to help grow your company. Delegating helps you free up your time to focus on more strategy related tasks and ones that will help earn more money. Or else, you risk being frustrated, demotivating your team members and ultimately not being successful in whatever project you’re doing.
Here are some simple guidelines to follow to learn how to delegate effectively.
Learn What You Shouldn’t Delegate
As with all tasks, there are some that only you can do or can’t trust someone to do yet. That includes tasks that reveals highly confidential information or you’re still in the brainstorming stages of. Some jobs require your input, such as certain types of content creation or something that relies on your specific skills. You also don’t have to delegate tasks that you like either.
If you learn what not to delegate, it’ll become much easier to hand off tasks that you know you don’t need to do by yourself.
Figure Out Tasks That Don’t Make You An Effective Manager
Now it’s time to figure out what you delegate. If you have a well oiled team, you should be able to delegate most things without putting your company at risk. This can include data entry tasks, filing, implementing simple systems or hiring new staff members. The important thing to remember is to not delegate tasks such as planning out strategy and building business relationships. Those should be reserved for you.
Get Really Specific
One of the reasons people aren’t good delegators is because they don’t understand that they can’t just hand off tasks. Managers can’t assume that a staff member knows how to get something done according to their specifications.
When delegating, get really specific. How do you want to task done? When should it get done? What is the criteria for success? If you can create systems and process for these types of tasks, the better.That way, if you decide to hand them off to someone else, you don’t have to take up to much of your time.
Provide the Right Tools
When delegating, it’s really important to give your staff the right tools so they can get the job done. For example, if you’re asking someone to help you schedule appointments, they’ll need access to your calendar, a scheduling tool, and a way to brief you on meetings. Even if you provide these tools, it’s crucial that you give the staff member time to learn how to use them and come to you with questions if necessary. That way, everything can run as smoothly as possible.
If you take all of the above and learn these delegation skills for managers, you should have a well-run team in no time. Now you need to learn to let go and trust that your staff will do everything in their power to make you and the company proud.
