Delegation

Other people do good work, too

It’s hard for perfectionists to delegate. Other people might do the task differently than we would, and since our way is the right way, logically, that means other people do it wrong.

This is the challenge—the thought that, “I’ll have to fix what they do anyway, so I might as well do it myself.”

To grow beyond this as leaders, there are some strategies that work:

• Make a checklist. What do you do and what do you check when you do it yourself? I’ve made several of these by having an extra Doc file open while working, and simply noting the steps as I go, then cleaning it up and adding little check boxes. Simple. I now have a step-by-step of how to do it right… and I can give copies of this to other people when delegating that task.

• Invest in growing your people’s competencies. Coach and mentor a junior person to take on a task they have not done before. Repeat regularly with new tasks. They learn to do something that will help their career, and you don’t need to do that task anymore. You can do the training yourself, or you can delegate training up that junior person to another direct report, or send them to a professional training program (e.g., learning a new software). Consider having the now-trained person give a lunch-and-learn to the entire team, to bring more people up-to-speed.

• Adopt a “first draft” mentality. Assume that the person you’ve delegated to will do good work, but not perfect work, and build in time to help them learn to revise and polish it to perfection.

(Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash)