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My big point about delegating is that it as not just assigning work.

Effective delegating is about making sure the right work gets done at the right level, and making your team more capable.

Building capability requires learning

And there is no learning as great as that which comes after failing.

Many managers treat delegating exactly the opposite – that their role is to prevent failure — to watch closely, to jump in and take over, fix, or modify — if it is not going well.

If you think about this from a learning perspective, what you have just done is to ensure that no real learning occurs.

Think about the alternative.  Throwing someone in the deep end…

Don’t take away the motivation to learn

When you fail it feels bad.  It is embarrassing, it causes business problems, it causes trouble for other people.  So it becomes a big personal motivator to fix it!

Real learning occurs when you not only see what you did wrong, but need to live with, and deal with the consequences of what you did wrong.  If you take away the pain of failing, you also take away the big, highly personal, motivator to get it right.

Don’t take away the lesson of how to succeed

By creating the safety net, and filling in all the hard parts for them, they never really experience what it means to succeed.

But if you let a smart person fail, they will figure it out.

Isn’t that how you got good at what you do?  By doing it.  Trial and error.  Feedback. Tying again?   They will learn how to really do it if you give them a chance.

If they never learn, you never build capability, and you get stuck working evening and weekends to “cover” for the fact that your team is not capable of the work it needs to deliver.

Don’t put limits on learning

Also, if you always step in you are ensuring that they will never get any better at the task then you are.

You are putting an artificial cap on their development.

I have often delegated things that I thought I was pretty good at, and had my employee blow me away with their ability to exceed my capabilities. 

This to me is one of the best parts of management.  When you can say, Wow, that’s amazing. You did that better than I ever imagined it could be done.  Bravo. Thank You.  Look at this new capability my team now has!!

If you are threatened by the thought of your employees being better than you, don’t be.  You will get more points for breeding star performers than you will ever get for work you do personally.  Read this.

Fail Small or Fail Big

OK. so admittedly this is a bit of a paradox — how do you succeed when your people are failing?

Think ahead to the desired outcome.  Today your team can’t do the work as well as you can, so you have two choices.  Do it yourself and prevent your team from growing, or take some risk in the short term, and in a year from now have a team that can do more than you ever imagined.

Pick your battles

Don’t pick the most business critical deliverable and put it with the most junior person.  But do pick a meaty task and let a smart person who can learn something run with it.  Always be on the lookout for opportunities to let people own outcomes and learn in the process.

Not everything important is mission critical.

It is your job to manage all the outcomes so that you create the space and opportunity for people to fail, learn, succeed and grow, while at the same time managing the overall outcome to create success. 

Here are some ideas.

Trust People

You will be amazed at how far some trust and encouragement goes.  (as compared to micromanaging).  Set a really clear desired outcome for the task, and then ask them to give you a plan which includes checkpoints and what you will measure them on to ensure progress.

This encouragement and trust gives them huge ownership in making it happen. They will be personally motivated to try harder than if you try and control everything along the way.

Create judges and review boards

If you are concerned that the deliverables are not going to be good enough, arrange some review boards instead of always picking apart people’s work personally.  If someone is creating a marketing campaign, have one of the measures be that 3 of the most cranky, difficult sales people have to say it’s OK before they bring it to you. 

That is a very practical, contained failure opportunity, which will help the person learn way more than you saying, it’s not good enough, let me fix it.

Create smaller, intermediate outcomes

If you are too concerned that a failure will be too big, pick a smaller objective and a target closer in so that you can see if things are on track or not.  Giving someone a set of sequential outcomes and challenges to pursue is far more motivating than spelling out every activity and packing their lunch every day.  Let them fly solo on shorter flights then help pick up the pieces only when necessary.

Always teach

You may think that letting someone fail is more discouraging and de-motivating than preventing it.  But just think about yourself.  How do you feel when your manager starts doing your job for you? or tells you that you’re not doing it right?   Is that more motivating than being given the space to figure things out for yourself, and really learn.

When someone fails — offer to answer questions and provide support, but have them own the learning process.

You can re-iterate the goals and continue to clarify the outcome.  You can answer questions about or even comment on the fact that there is a gap between what they produced and the agreed desired outcome.  But make their job to fix it and get it right.

If you are the one to fix it — you will always be the one to fix it. 

You will be stuck and you will have failed BIG by not leading a team capable of the work that needs to get done.

Next Up on Delegating…

In a couple of weeks I will post another article on creating more ways to feel comfortable that delegating (and letting go) will create a successful outcome.  You own the outcome.

Delegating better is not about being willing to be uncomfortable about a successful outcome –  it is about creating a system to let go of the detail, yet stay comfortable that the outcome will be achieved.

More Resources on Delegating:

Delegate or Die: 10 Ideas (plus webinar/podcast)
Addiction to Detail
Building Capacity

This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Be a Better Leader, Strategy Implementation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.