How to Delegate to Improve Business Efficiency

How to Delegate to Improve Business Efficiency

As a leader, delegating work is important because you cannot do everything. Delegating can help you empower your team and make it easy to identify who is best suited for the tasks at hand. It can also lighten your burden and give room for your team to develop new skills and knowledge.

While delegating prepares your team for more responsibilities in the future, you may find yourself failing to delegate effectively. Perhaps you may fail to delegate, thinking that delegation is just passing work to someone else. Maybe you believe you can do it much better, or you are just nervous about letting go.

The reality is, allowing others to help you make workloads manageable can improve the efficiency of your company. It can also build trust, improve team engagement, and assist with professional development. To help improve business efficiency, here are delegation tips you need to consider.

Identify What Can be Delegated

Start by prioritizing your list of responsibilities and tasks. Tackle higher priority tasks and delegate the low priority tasks. It is also important to know when you should delegate responsibilities. Delegate when you have no time to complete all the tasks or feel someone else will perform better.

Much as delegation is valuable, there are times where you’ll be required not to. If a certain task is likely to have an impact on your reputation, avoid delegating it even if it is a low-priority task. If you find yourself taking more time to explain how a task needs to be done, you’d rather do it and save time.

Consider the Skills of Team Members

Understanding your team’s skill set can help you delegate effectively. Once you decide what to delegate, match the tasks to the skills of your team members. Be sure to choose the best person for the task. If a person is more skilled than you, it makes things better.

For instance, if you have a person who wishes to gain management experience, you could assign such a person to supervise an intern. Take time to also learn your team’s strengths and leverage them to benefit the entire business.

Take Time to Educate

If a team member you are delegating to cannot perform the task as required, the quality of work will suffer. It can also lower the team’s morale and, therefore, taking time to educate your team on the tasks can be a powerful leadership and mentoring approach.

Taking time to teach your team may seem like adding more work to your plate. However, it may end up saving your time in the long run. When a team is well conversant with what needs to be done, it’ll repeatedly reduce your workload.

Set Expectations

Don’t just assign tasks but also set expectations on how and when you should complete the tasks. Make sure that the expectations are realistic and achievable, especially when delegating a task for the first time.

To help you monitor the tasks and keep track of deadlines and updates, it is a good idea to implement an agile management strategy. With an agile project management system, you can suggest improvements as the team moves forward and spread and share the workload with the first movers in the team.

Trust

Effective delegation is founded on trust. When you trust your team, you will be confident with how the team will perform tasks. Let go of control, take the big picture view, and focus more on the outcome rather than actions. It is hard to find out if someone can perform until you give them an opportunity.

Follow Up

Following up on the progress of work will show how important the tasks are and can help you predict better workflow. Follow-up will help you know if your team is doing what you asked them to and if not, come up with what you can do.

You may be required to educate your team throughout the process. Make sure you show appreciation to your team and encourage them to keep going. You can follow up by asking if your team is comfortable executing tasks and giving them all the necessary information. Ask them also how effective you were in setting expectations and whether the timelines set are reasonable.

Watch Your Business Flourish

Management roles involve several tasks that cannot be completed by one person. As a leader, you may feel it right to take up all these tasks to ensure that they are done well. However, the more you include people to own tasks and projects, the more your organization becomes efficient. It is, therefore, important to know when or how exactly to delegate and to whom.