by Judy Rathwell | Oct 24, 2023 | Change Management, Communication, Decision-making, Trust
6 things to consider before you delegate work
The best leaders are masters at delegation. Why? They know how to empower their teams to get work done. But it’s not only about getting work done or knowing how to share tasks in the best way. It’s also about creating an environment where employees are proud of their work and can call it their own. These are the critical pieces to learning how to delegate work effectively.
What Is Delegating?
In short, delegating is allocating the right work to the right people. Delegating work is about sharing a task and decision-making responsibilities to increase others’ commitment, accelerate results, and build capability.
The delegating leadership style, one of the four leadership styles covered in the situational leadership model, is about managers sharing authority and responsibility with their employees.
The Cost of Not Delegating
The reluctance of leaders to delegate carries a steep cost. As leaders take on more work, they get overwhelmed and stressed. They may even burn out completely and quit. 70% of leaders surveyed under the age of 35 report feeling used up at the end of every day, with rates even higher among women and minorities.
At the same time, their team is likely also frustrated. They don’t feel like they’re contributing enough, nor do they have the authority to do their work as they see fit. They’ll likely end up disengaged or start polishing up their resumes for another role.
What to Consider Before You Delegate Work
Delegation has to go beyond simply assigning a task. It has to be done thoughtfully, with the right balance of direction from the leader.
Here’s what to consider before you delegate work:
- What’s the desired output? What will the completed task look like? How will you judge whether it is completed well or not?
- What’s the importance of the task? How important is this assigned task to the team? How important is this assigned task to the company?
- Are you delegating authority appropriately? What key decisions will need to be made during the project? Will the person or team have the authority to make critical decisions?
- To whom should you delegate the work? Who has the skills to complete this work? Who has the motivation? Is there anyone who might be interested in the work that you haven’t considered before? What are the benefits to the person completing this delegated task?
- What’s the method of sharing work? Will you have a meeting to generate ideas or to define the task further with the person? What is the delegation process? Have clear expectations been given?
- How will you assess the results of the tasks you’ve delegated? How will you give feedback along the way? How will you ensure that the criteria is clear for what success looks like?
If the leader is struggling to answer these questions, then they should re-evaluate if the task should actually be delegated.
“Delegation is not about micromanaging, its about trusting others to do their best work”.
– Unknown
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DiSC is an assessment that aids with effective communication
by Judy Rathwell | Apr 18, 2021 | Adaptability, Change Management, Communication, Influence, Newsletter
Common wisdom in management science and
practice has it that to build support for a change project, visionary
leadership is needed to outline what is wrong with the current situation. By
explaining how the envisioned change will result in a better and more appealing
future, leaders can overcome resistance to change. But research, recently
published in the Academy of Management Journal, leads us to add a
very important caveat to this.
A root cause of resistance to change is
that employees identify with and care for their organizations. People fear that
after the change, the organization will no longer be the organization they
value and identify with — and the higher the uncertainty surrounding the
change, the more they anticipate such threats to the organizational identity
they hold dear. Change leadership that emphasizes what is good about the
envisioned change and bad about the current state of affairs typically fuels
these fears because it signals that changes will be fundamental and
far-reaching.
Counterintuitively, then, effective change
leadership has to emphasize continuity — how what is central to “who we are” as
an organization will be preserved, despite the uncertainty and changes on the
horizon.
This is a straightforward and actionable
notion that we put to the test in two studies. The first study was a survey of
209 employees and their supervisors from a number of organizations that
announced organizational change plans (including relocations and business
expansions, reorganizations, structural or technical changes, product changes,
changes in leadership, and mergers). The focus was on how effective the
leadership was in stimulating employee support for the change, measured through
supervisor ratings of employee behavior. As predicted, results showed that
leadership was more effective in building support for change the more that
leaders also communicated a vision of continuity, because a vision of
continuity instilled a sense of continuity of organizational identity in
employees. These effects were larger when employees experienced more
uncertainty at work (as measured by employee self-ratings).
In the second study, we tested the same
idea using a laboratory experiment so that we could draw conclusions about
causality. 208 business school students participated in the study, and the
context was potential changes in the school’s curriculum. They received one of
two messages allegedly from the dean of the business school. One conveyed
a vision of change for the curriculum, and the other conveyed the same vision
of change but also conveyed a vision of continuity of identity. Independent of
which message they were exposed to, students received one of two versions of
background information that suggested either low uncertainty or high
uncertainty about change outcomes. We then assessed their sense of continuity
of identity and their support for the change as expressed in actual behavior:
help in drafting a letter to persuade other students to support the change. The
results of this second study were similar to those of the first: Support for
change was higher when the vision of change was accompanied by a vision of
continuity, because in this case people’s sense of continuity of identity was
higher. Again, the effects were stronger when uncertainty about the change was
higher.
The implications of this research are
straightforward. In overcoming resistance to change and building support for
change, leaders need to communicate an appealing vision of change in
combination with a vision of continuity. Unless they are able
to ensure people that what defines the organization’s identity — “what
makes us who we are” — will be preserved despite the changes, leaders may have
to brace themselves for a wave of resistance.
Source: Harvard Business Review – by Merlijn Venus, Daan Stam, and Daan van Knippenberg
