Delegation and Career Success Part 3

To continue....

Responsibility of the Delegator for each level is to follow the delegation approach (referred to in the model’s original form "Leadership Style")

(S1) Telling or directing, characterised by one-way communication in which the delegator defines the task of the person being delegated to and tells them how, when, and where to do it. To gain more commitment and motivation from your employee, then you should of course use a participative style.

(S2) Selling/Coaching for D2 tasks is required as while providing clear direction as to responsibilities, the delegator needs to employ effective two-way communication and emotional support, to get the individual to "buy into decisions that have to be made."

(S3) Participating (high relationship/low task behavior). Here decision-making and task management is shared between the delegator and the person nominated to do the task – the main role of the delegator is to "facilitate and communicate" and to ensure the approach is based on "high support and low direction". Low direction is used because the person being delegated to is competent in the task.

(S4) Style 4 - is referred to in the original model as "The Delegating/Trusting Leader" With a task being delegated to someone whose is both competent and willing the delegator just needs to hand over the task. The problem here is that if the delegator is not trusting of the employee taking in the task he or she will tend to over control the situation and frustrate the person doing the job.

If the manager uses the approaches (S1 to S4 above) and remembers to praise people for doing a ‘good’ job, rather than just correcting them when they fall short, great improvements in delegation practices and performance can be achieved.

Another key to effective delegation is to ensure that the individual you have delegated to understands the overall purpose of the project or task being delegated and where it fits into the overall process or operation. Always provide picture of what a successful outcome or output will look like including measurements to be used regardless of the level of delegation or style being applied.

A final point: Keep The Task or Assignment Delegated!

One of the most common reasons for the delegation process to fail is that the manager takes the work back! Do not do this… as an effective delegator a manager must fix the problems not avoid them by taking back the task.

If you delegate effectively remember you will need to evaluate the improvement (or otherwise) on an ongoing basis and… be patient… as successful change and improvement through delegation can take some time.

ORGLEARN http://www.orglearn.org/ has more management articles

ref: "Situation Leadership II" (Blanchard) is still in my opinion the best base for understanding how to delegate effectively to different individuals. Here is a handy link to his booklist: 

http://www.kenblanchard.com/about_ken_blanchard_companies/business_leadership_books/

If you cannot delegate well, you will never manage (or lead) well!

Delegation and Career Success Part 2

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.