Task Delegation For Beginners

Delegation is a process to share the work scope and responsibility. It is a crucial instrument for organizing work in parallel. Let us check the best and the worst practices and see their consequences.

Delegation? Yes, please!

Before asking somebody to take your task and do it, you should clearly understand the task. You need to know what you need to do, how you need to do it, and the outcome or the result.

The next logical step is to explain all this information to a person (let us call him executor) who will overtake the task in question. In many cases, the explanation may not be enough, so you can show some examples or share experience and best practices on how to do the task properly.

Let the executor define the internal processes and partially take responsibility for the task. Give him some freedom in organizing the work and do not suppress initiative or unusual approaches. You may give some recommendations, but it is the executive who has to decide in the end.

It is a good idea to check the progress from time to time or organize synchronization calls or meetings to understand the situation. You may set up several milestones and have a call after each of them is achieved to monitor the state and check the issues.

Never again!

Try not to go too deep into details when you are passing the task to the executor. Some details may be too small to spend time for discussion; others may become irrelevant. If there be some questions about the details, you can discuss them on synchronization calls or meetings.

Avoid micromanagement as much as you can. The main point of a delegation of some responsibility to another person is to give him complete or almost complete control over the task, and you can spend your time doing something else. Micromanagement kills both these advantages.

Delegation of small tasks may not be worth it in many cases. You may spend more time on explanations and the delegation process itself than the time needed to do the actual task. Try to roughly estimate how much time you will need to do the task, and if it is close or comparable to the time required to delegate it — do it yourself.

The opposite approach may be the issue too. Delegating a very complicated task to a person who does not have the required qualification may end up badly. The better idea is to split this complicated task into smaller, more manageable tasks and then delegate them one by one.

These are simple but very efficient best practices and recommendations on delegating some work scope to another person. Read, understand, and try to apply them to real tasks, and you may save a lot of your time in almost any situation.