Delegating: Who Gets What

Domain: Managing Others - Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

We've covered why you should be delegating more and what it is that you should be delegating. But who do you delegate it to?

Your team is the obvious answer, but what we're focusing on here is how you decide which tasks go to which employees.

You could certainly just shotgun all your tasks across the entire team without thought, but there is a more intentional approach that will maximize individual development while also making the team as a whole more effective. Here are just a few ways to think about it…

Know your people

We've emphasized this in other topics because it's foundational to good leadership. You need to have a strong understanding of the strengths, interests, skillsets and development goals of your entire team.

What are they great at? Where do they struggle? What do they love doing? What are their aspirations? Use these questions as a litmus test. If you can't answer all of them, you need to get to know your people better.

Go deeper

The obvious advice is to match the required skills of the task to the strengths of your team listed above, but that's only going to get you so far.

A much more interesting question is what new skills could this task benefit from? This gets you looking beyond the status quo and allows you to consider how new skills could add value to a familiar task.

Of course, the individual we delegate to should carry the potential to do the job well. All we're saying here is that your big marketing project doesn't always have to go to your top marketing person. Sometimes it can go to the second or third strongest marketing person who might be able to bring something new to the table.

Challenge

We've said this before, but part of effective delegation is that it will stretch or challenge the individual to some degree. If they are not growing from delegation, it's going to be seen as busy work.

In an ideal scenario, delegation benefits all parties. It develops the delegate, frees-up capacity for the delegator and makes the team as whole more effective.

Share the wealth

A common mistake many leaders make is delegating most tasks to their top performer. While we're happy they're delegating at all, this approach limits the team's potential and could actually cause issues in the long-run.

By giving most of the work to one person, you're not taking advantage of the broad set of skills and talents available across the entire team. This limits innovation because the same manner of thinking will be applied to a large number of tasks. There is also a good chance that the rest of your team will come to see this single-person delegation as favoritism which could hurt morale.

We recommend delegating to almost everyone on your team (a note about underperformers below). At the end of the day, it's about considering what each individual brings to the table and how you might be able to leverage those talents in new and exciting ways.

You may find that your strongest performers end-up with more tasks than others. This is natural, especially for those who are somewhat new to highly proactive and intentional delegation. We recommend not getting too lost in how many tasks each individual has. Instead, look at the bigger picture and consider whether or not everyone is being consistently challenged in a way that is proportionate to their abilities.

A note on underperformers

Counterintuitively, there is an art to delegating to underperformers in a way that can improve their performance. However, it's a nuanced and highly individualized endeavor.

For the purpose of this series, we'll recommend that you avoid delegating any complex or time consuming tasks to these individuals. With underperformers, we're not worried about whether delegation is stretching their abilities because their development focus should be aimed at improving how they perform their core responsibilities.

Thank you for reading. My hope is always that you've found something helpful and easy to implement.

This week’s action items:

1. Make sure you have a deep understanding of the strengths and talents of your entire team.

2. Identify the very next thing you need to delegate.

3. What new skills could that task benefit from?

4. Who on your team would benefit from this task as a development opportunity?

5. Is there someone other than your top-performer you should consider giving this task to?