Win-Win Delegation
Win-Win Delegation
If you're a manager, you probably know what it's like to have more work than you can possibly do. However, it's unlikely you'll receive approval to hire another "you." How can you free up some time to focus on the strategic work of management? You may have an untapped resource in your group. Take a look at the career aspirations of your staff: Does anyone want to move up to be a team lead or manager? Delegating a defined chunk of management work can give someone the chance to try on a new role and learn a new skill.
I started doing management work long before I officially took a management job. One wise boss gave me a chance to practice parts of management by delegating some of his work to me. I learned about budgets, project portfolios, and strategic planning long before I made the transition into management. (I never did enjoy budgets, but at least I knew how they worked.) My boss used delegation to create a win-win situation: I learned valuable skills, and he had more time to focus on other priorities.
When you start looking at your workload, first determine if the work is really important. Better to get rid of busy work completely than delegate it to someone else. Make sure that the work you are delegating will buy you significant time and create a learning opportunity for your staff member.
Match Skills to the Task
Match the work and the recipient carefully. You want to provide a chance to learn a new skill and practice it, not create an impossible task. Someone who is good at planning and organizing her own work might be a good candidate for taking on one of your small projects. A staff member who enjoys analyzing defect data might be a good candidate for gathering metrics and creating trend reports.
Determine How Much to Delegate
Decide how much of the task you're handing off. Are you interested only in the end product, or do you want to check-in on intermediate steps? Look at the skills and experience of the person you're delegating to and formulate the delegation appropriately. Consider delegating in steps. For example, when you delegate a project to select a new defect-tracking tool, first delegate the investigation, then generating alternatives, and finally making a recommendation.
Explain Why
Describe how the task fits into the big picture, why it's important, and who benefits from the work. Providing a rationale will help the person assuming the task develop judgment and understanding. Without the why people are only learning what to do, not how the task adds value and benefits the organization. And people make better decision when they understand the context.
Delegate Authority with the Task
Make sure the person has the authority to accomplish the work. Telling the team member isn't enough. Other people in the group must know that you've delegated the task as well. One tester I know complained that her boss had delegated the job of collecting status to her without telling the rest of the team. When she went to talk to her teammates about progress, they responded by asking, "Who died and made you queen?" The boss had made her status queen--but hadn't bothered to tell anyone. Handing over the work without the authority is a set up for friction, frustration, and failure.
Offer Coaching
For unfamiliar tasks or those that are building new capabilities in your team members, offer coaching. Don't ask, "Do you need help?"; people may reflexively answer "No." Instead, ask, "What sort of coaching would you like?" This establishes a presumption that receiving help is normal, not a sign of failure.
Focus on Results
When you delegate work, focus on the results you're looking for. Describe what those results are and list any specific criteria that should be met. Are there any options that would be unacceptable? Describe those, too.
Once you've described the results, let go! Allow the staff person to figure out the how. Prescribing the method for accomplishing the work comes across as micromanagement.
When you delegate a task, completion may take a bit longer than it would take you to do the work. Consider it an investment: you are directly building capability in your staff, and investing in helping the other person build her skills by paying attention to her career goals. This investment will build trust and contribute to retaining staff. The time it takes to complete a task will lessen as the person becomes familiar with the steps involved. In the meantime, if the work meets quality and time requirements, you're headed in the right direction.
A Word of Caution
Now that you're reducing your workload, make sure you aren't overloading your staff. Don't pile more work onto the already overloaded.
Use delegation to help you and help your staff grow. Look for interest and opportunity; define reasonable chunks based on skills and risk. Give people enough rope to move around, but not enough rope to hang themselves
Comments
#1 Submitted by Venkatakrishnan R... on Thu, 10/07/2004 - 7:38am.
Interesting ! 1.It is essential to match the skill with the work that is delegated or else you are most likely to end spending more time on explaining /guiding "How".It so happens some of the subordinates have aspirations to become a manager without being fully aware of their potential, these people say, " I can do this", "I want to grow ,"I need a big career" but do they have the skill/ maturity/ potential to withstand , perform and EXCEL ?Unless otherwise subordinates can think and act on "HOW" --- Managers need to think twice before delegating the managerial work.2.What you delegate is equally critical - it may be so that the top management expects you to do it ,then there is no way you can delegate it fully.3.The other Important option is to involve subordinates in these management process as frequently as possibly , it not only develops them for the managerial role ,it brings the team together, more visibility in the managerial process across the team besides helping you out in getting better results.
#2 Submitted by Alexei Barantsev on Wed, 08/25/2004 - 4:58am.
Hi, Esther! Good article, but don't overstate the value of delegation against other methods. I'm sure you are aware of various other leadership styles, including e.g. sutiational leadership. Some people are good for delegation, other ones are not. Of course, you mentioned that in the article - the importance of right matching, but you meant only skills, not the so-called development level. I think it would be worth to clarify this point. Kindest regards,
#3 Submitted by Gary Davis on Tue, 08/17/2004 - 1:49pm.
I agree with Gene - excellent column, Esther. I heartily agree with Gene's comments as well - as one of the many displaced front line managers, I now work as a consultant and see the effects of the lack of front line supervision. just say no does work for more than drugs.Esther, great use of alliteration in the paragraph on delegating authority, although at times we want to add the F from SNAFU to your list of results of poor delegatoin skills.
#4 Submitted by John Daughety on Mon, 08/23/2004 - 7:19pm.
I liked this article very much, and I want to emphasize the importance of this practice as a way of becoming a better manager. This is another opportunity to learn how good you are at giving people a vision of the goal and the capability to achieve it. In these cases I have seen the feedback on my management style come back much more quickly and be more instructive. As you said on a response below, many managers are put in their positions without good examples to follow or good mentors. In these cases, little experiments like this can improve how a manager runs his/her entire team. One other point I think is important - not everyone on the team wants to become a manager. I saw Timothy Lister at a small ASEE conference and he was asked why it seemed a requirement that ood developers be promoted to project management roles when that might not be a good idea. He said "How many doctors do you talk to who say 'My career plan is to be a manager of doctors'?" While there are doctors who want to be administrators and may be very good at it, the majority do not fall into this group. Where you describe matching the task to the appropriate team member, I would add that some team members, although highly valuable to the team, should not be considered for delegation. Like the person who asked the question at the conference, I have seen the accomplishments and attitudes of too many excellent employees drop significantly when they were shoehorned into a management role. Thanks for a great checklist for implementation of this idea.
#5 Submitted by Danny R. Faught on Sat, 08/21/2004 - 2:27pm.
Interesting feedback below on the need to say "No" to management, or to remind the manager that some other task is going to be postponed when taking on a higher priority task. I think the article overly deemphasizes the fact that employees practically always feel overloaded, so asking them to help with management tasks is going to delay some other task every time. I remember the backlash of the self-managed teams fad, where employees routinely complained that the purpose of it was only for managers to lighten their own workload. In any case, when you overcome the difficult task of fitting it in with the rest of the work, the your idea is a good one. Consider also the possibility that the delegated task will not be the employee's top priority, but maybe number two or three on a list of ten items.
#6 Submitted by neill mccarthy on Fri, 08/20/2004 - 1:19pm.
Another good article on the still often neglected people side of testing.On the enough rope...it is worth using the rope you give people as way of following up and steering them through positive coaching, in the right direct. The other trick with the rope is learning not to use it as a choke chain...when i first started what i thought was win-win delegation I took it all bit too personally and as soon as the win was no longer feeling mutual or in my favour (i liked 60-40 wins at the time, i win they win but i win more...thankfully I have matured since then) I would yank them back, turning it it to lose-lose delegation. A good mentor thankfully spotted the trait before i throttled, metaphorically,too many of my team.
#7 Submitted by Indira Ramakrishnan on Fri, 08/20/2004 - 11:10am.
Great article. Makes a Manager job easier when one doen intelligent work delegation and match the resource to the job.One just need a bit of patience to help the resource come up the learning curve. Not delegating displays ones insecurity and not helping them by giving people enough rope to move around, but enough rope to hang themselves is a sure way killing their career.
#8 Submitted by Istvan Fay on Thu, 08/19/2004 - 8:08pm.
Hi, Esther! Great stuff, congratulations! My favoritue part is about clearly and EXPLICITLY formulating: - what are all the expected outputs - how can the other person know whether she made a good job - and what are the solutions you cannot acceptBest regards, Istvan Fay
#9 Submitted by heusserm on Wed, 08/18/2004 - 10:55am.
Great article, Esther. I especially liked the line: "This establishes a presumption that receiving help is normal, not a sign of failure." In the past few months I've come to realize just how much of a faux paus it is in American business to admit that you are still learning - that you don't allready know it all! I find the pre-supposition that everything is fine to be extremely odd and counter-productive, but, as DeMarco said "In a room full of liars, the honest person is at a distinct disadvantage." One more thought: Gene mentioned the flattening of organizations as bad - That's one of the main premises of Slack, Tom DeMarco's book about getting past organizational burnout. According to DeMarco, most of the innovation happens in middle management, but it _only_ happens if they have time to think. Creating first-line supervisors or delagating tasks are two ways to do this, and I appreciated the insights.
#10 Submitted by Gene Fellner on Mon, 08/16/2004 - 6:29pm.
This is one of Esther's best articles yet, and they're always pretty good. It speaks to one of my biggest frustrations. The PC revolution is assumed to have increased everyone's productivity so much that organizational pyramids have been flattened. Fewer people are expected to do the same amount of work because PCs make work easier? Ha! Watch a suddenly secretary-less manager spend two hours trying to center the heading on a report. The worst impact of this was the disappearance of the first-line supervisors, those unsung heroes who patiently taught us everything we needed to know about the job and the organization. The author points out that somebody still needs to do that. Too many people are promoted into management because they have the right attitude and perhaps even the people skills, but nobody prepared them to actually do the work. . . . Regarding the problem that was the springboard for this: too much work. Having published an article explaining in documented detail how overwork is destroying our projects, our lives, our families, our companies, and our national economy, I am a crusader for the "just say no" approach. With today's confusing matrix organizations, it's quite possible that your manager honestly doesn't know how much work you already have. (In fact you may not either; time management is not America's forte.) Management consultants are starting to advise people to very assertively tell the boss, "These are the tasks I've already been assigned that take more than all of my time. Which one would you like me to postpone in order to take on this new one?" Delegating to a promising subordinate is a win-win-win strategy, and an escape route from the chaotic new workplace with no supervisors.