If you’re a supervisor or manager, you already know how important it is to build up your team, and one of the skills you have to be good at when you supervise others is the art of delegating. Without being able to delegate to other team members, your management skills will suffer because let’s face it, you can’t do it all yourself. Learning how to delegate is not that difficult, as long as you learn a few basic, but very important skills.
Learning the Basics of Delegating to Others
You’ll become a micromanager if you don’t learn how to delegate, so the first thing you should do is figure out why you’re unable to do this. For many people, it’s the fear that the task won’t be done correctly, while others simply aren’t sure just what they should delegate to others. To decide what to delegate to others, consider two things:
Which tasks are tasks that don’t need special attention and that anybody can do?
Which tasks can be given to someone with more experience than you?
If you’re working on a company website and someone else has expertise at this, it’s best to let that person handle the site-building task. In addition, always be specific about the tasks that you do delegate to others, so instead of telling someone to “write an article for the company website or blog,” you should tell them to “write a 500-word article on the company’s mission statement and what the company does.”
Don’t Stop at the Beginning
When you delegate to others, make sure you remain in the loop the entire time so that you know what is going on and what others are doing. Give your employees access to the information and resources they need to do the job well, because if this doesn’t happen they’ll think you don’t trust them to do the job themselves. Eventually, they will fail at the task you’ve assigned to them, which will likely give you an excuse to go back to micromanaging them and putting you back at square one.