Being in charge of a team and having the responsibility of the viability of the company is a difficult task in which you are almost never convinced that you are doing the right thing. However, delegating the work and making certain decisions is fundamental to ensure the viability of the company; do you imagine being able to get new customers while you are answering the phone or managing the communication?
Delegating tasks is necessary for the company to be able to work beyond you, but it is not always easy. You can not be personally aware of everything that is done in the company, not delegating work is a waste of time, money, business opportunities and quality of life.
There are many types of leadership, but one of the keys to be a good leader, common in almost all the manuals, is precisely how to delegate effectively at work. As a leader and responsible for a team of professionals, you must change micromanagement by strategic management.
Why is it important for your professional growth to know how to delegate work in your organization?
Despite the importance of delegating work to improve the productivity of the company and to reach new professional horizons, many people avoid it by claiming a lack of time (which in the short / medium term would be solved by delegating tasks), not having enough confidence in the team, not believing that someone else is prepared to take on the job, not wanting to increase the workload … or by fearing that the person in whom you delegate is more efficient than you.
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Contrary to all false beliefs about the fear of trusting others in our work, the benefits of delegating are very important for both the team leader and the person in whom trust is placed:
- Delegating the work according to the abilities of each person of the team or according to their most outstanding abilities increases productivity and improves the mood of the team.
- It increases the time available for team leaders to guide strategic lines, opens up new business opportunities or focuses on important milestones.
- It increases the motivation of the team as they see that they can develop professionally within the company, that they trust their work and that they can continue to evolve within the organization.
- The consequence of not effectively delegating at work may be a failure as a team leader. Therefore, it is important to spend the required time and effort to delegate tasks to a new person and to teach them. If done efficiently, we will gain more free time.
5 Steps to Learn How to Effectively Delegate at Work
To learn how to properly delegate at work, it is important to put into practice a series of expert leadership advice. Here are the five steps created by Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky that will help you to take the final step in your leadership:
- Are in charge of a task that does not fit you? Then it is time to start analyzing who is really in charge of this task and transmit it gradually so that the person can assume it.
- Make a list with all the tasks of the next two weeks (meetings included) and the (real) time that you would dedicate to each one. Well, 25% of that list is tasks that you can delegate, so think about it and evaluate the skills of the person (or people) of your team who is going to deal with them.
- Identify which are the functions that give you the best or that satisfy you, and try to delegate the other tasks to people in your team with better skills for them.
- In many cases, the inertia of the day to day makes us take on functions that may not correspond to us. Ask yourself: What functions have your employees assigned you? How did they assign them? Are they the ones that correspond to you? Which ones should you be assuming? Are there others you would like to take on? What should you learn to keep growing? Think about whether the old tasks are necessary or not, if you can delegate them or if you can combine them with new ones.
- Find out if there is a role that nobody is playing and that prevents the equipment from advancing and assume it.
The diversity of the skills of a team allows the same tasks performed by different people to be integrated differently in the company and to obtain better results with the same effort.
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