Developing Willing Employees
Effective management requires an ongoing process selecting people that
can be trained to take on more stretching tasks. If you are familiar with
Blanchard’s Situational Leadership II the method by which you do this will
become obvious. By first giving small amounts of authority to complete basic
tasks and then by monitoring their progress and making corrections where
necessary, is a great way to start.
It is also important to look your group's workload as a whole. The
delegation of tasks will affect the whole group and it is wise to find out how
work is now allocated and how much time is available for each member to do new,
developmental tasks. It's a good idea to involve your entire group in the
process. All of us are somewhat motivated by a sense of equity and an equitable
distribution of both workload and learning opportunities is essential.
For delegation to meet both work and development goals managers need
to:
Delegate assignments that a team member
needs to strengthen areas of weakness.
Delegate a variety of activities broaden and
add interest to the recipient’s job.
Delegate activities that will, if carried
out effectively, lead to advancement of the individual/s being delegated to.
Remember you may need to delegate in a chain effect. What I mean here
is A takes over say two or three of your tasks and B takes over two or three of
A’s task’s. You will need to keep a watchful eye on both A and B.
The Four Stages of Delegating
The Blanchard Situational Leadership (or Hershey & Blanchard) model
is I believe the best approach. Although the model is used as a “Leadership
Model” it still provides a great basis for assessing “what and how much” to
delegate to employees. The categories they use are often misconstrued as generalisations about an individuals overall competence. It must be remembered that the
categories need to be task specific. This means that employees can be at
development level 1 (D1) in one task and perhaps D4 in another. I have changed
the level descriptions below from the original model to better reflect the
delegation discussion.
D1: Staff member is
both unwilling and unable to take responsibility for performing a task.
D2: Staff member is
unable however they are willing to do a job task.
D3: Staff member is
able however unwilling to perform a task.
D4: Staff member is
willing and fully competent to do what is asked of them.
More on delegation and management at http://www.orglearn.org and if no one is delegating and developing you perhaps it's time to dust of your resume.