How to Delegate

📆 9/27/2023 12:14 PM

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📆 9/27/2023 12:14 PM
📰 HarvardBiz

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Strategies for handing off work — and why it’s harder than it may seem.

, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. Delegating is a skill that’s often overlooked. And yet, it’s an essential part of leadership. Without it, how can you rise above the tactical grind and focus on strategic thinking? But delegating well is harder than it may seem.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. And just to clarify for our listeners, RTX is Raytheon Technologies. You can use that acronym now that we clarified it, but just want to make sure everyone knows what we’re talking about.AMY GALLO: Yeah. And Deb, what do you hear in what Jasmine’s saying about the importance of delegation as well as the challenges that many of us face?

AMY GALLO: So, we know delegation is a critical leadership skill. We know it benefits not just you, but other people. Let’s get into how you actually do it. Deb, what steps do you recommend we take to decide whether or not to delegate a task, a decision, a responsibility? JASMINE LEFLORE: Yeah. So, in my day job, I’m starting a new project where I’m going to be helping create some virtual interactive demos for our products. So, I’m coming up with almost like a one pager of what our technology does, the benefits of it, who it serves and being able to delegate that to our younger engineers or early careers to do that for all of our projects. So, I’m basically starting off with one of our key products.

DEBORAH GRAYSON RIEGEL: What strikes me is that if you do that, you reduce the risk of what we call micromanaging, right? So, nobody wants to be a micromanager. That is for sure and yet-DEBORAH GRAYSON RIEGEL: Thank you for offering a fair and balanced perspective.

DEBORAH GRAYSON RIEGEL: Most people’s instinct would be to say, this is taking too much time because if they believe that it’s taking too much time, they won’t do it and they won’t have to do it. I think we actually want to challenge our confirmation bias that this is taking more time and it would just be easier and faster for me to do it myself. It’s going to be more likely that it is taking the right amount of time which is longer than it feels comfortable.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. Well, and I want to go back to what you were saying earlier about delegating to peers, because this is my role at HBR. I don’t manage anyone. I don’t have anyone who’s a natural person to delegate to. It would always be delegating to peers, and I think that’s why I was waiting for the volunteer, I assumed everyone knew that I was burnt out on doing this, but no one had any… I had never even articulated that.

DEBORAH GRAYSON RIEGEL: Jasmine, I’m hearing you align really nicely with the research that we talked about a little bit earlier, the idea of that when women delegate, they tend to delegate less, and when they do it, they do it with more guilt and anxiety associated with it. That makes a lot of sense that you wouldn’t want to burden someone.

DEBORAH GRAYSON RIEGEL: I think dragging your feet is an interpretation that we may want to define a little clearer, right? So, dragging your feet could look like somebody sulking while doing it, right? It could be tone of voice, facial expressions. Dragging your feet could also look like missing deadlines, right? So, we want to be really clear about what behavior we’re observing that we’re interpreting as dragging their feet.

DEBORAH GRAYSON RIEGEL: Well, I’m going to push back at the overuse of the word “we.” So, this is something that I hear all the time. “What do we need to do to get this done? When could we expect this, right? When will we see the next step?” No, right? As soon as it’s “we,” right? We say that because it’s friendly, it feels collaborative.

AMY GALLO: I like the idea of asking her because I have a feeling she would say, “Well, just tell me what I have to do.” She probably has impatience with the hemming and hawing I do in the language, but that’s just a hunch, and why not just ask her, right?AMY GALLO: Deb. So, you’ve delegated. What questions do you ask to assess whether they’re actually ready to go off and do the thing? That they actually understand the expectations, all of that.

JASMINE LEFLORE: Deborah, when it comes to taking that wheel, how do you do that in a way that doesn’t make that person feel like they’re not doing it right? DEBORAH GRAYSON RIEGEL: Yes. So, that idea of giving some positive feedback, even if the feedback isn’t about the outcome, but the feedback is about the process or a part of the progress that they made or even how well they handled the feedback that you needed to take it back, absolutely.

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