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Master These 3 Easy Steps to Delegate Work That Empowers Employees
How good work done by great people produces outstanding results.
Dave Kline
January 11, 2023
"That's ok. I'll do it."
Credit: Chris Bachman
If you utter these 5 words as a manager, you've lost.
And let's be honest, we've all said them before.
Why do I think these are the 5 most dangerous words you can use?
"That's ok." Actually, it's not. You wouldn't be stepping in if it was done well. So you're not being clear with your expectations nor holding them accountable.
"I'll" Unless this sentence ends with "give you some coaching" or "provide you guidance," you're no longer managing. You're doing.
"Do it." You're back to being the bottleneck. Worse, no one is learning. There is no compounding. It was a chance to get better, and you interrupted the cycle.
But there's a reason it is so easy for these words to fly out of our mouths, and that reason is fear. Fear of failure. Fear of inefficiency. Fear of obsolescence. I covered all the fears holding you back in this thread if you missed it.
Stare at each of those fears, and you'll realize two things:
There is some small nugget of truth behind most of those fears
The risk that fear poses is smaller than the benefit of empowering your team
In short, if you're not prioritizing and delegating work, you're not really managing.
But even leaders who see past the fear still struggle to delegate. If you read past the first two lines, that's probably you. But I promise you, there's a simple path.
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Choose the Right Work
Part of the reason delegating gets a bad rap is that centuries of managers have done it for the wrong reason. They take the work they don't want to do and get it in the hands of anyone paid less than them who'll take it.
Managers today, your job is to make that type of work simply go away. And then focus on getting meaningful work into the hands of the people most capable of doing it excellently.
Let's start with a framework many of us are familiar with: The Eisenhower Matrix.
The punchline of this framework (as originally written) is you want to delegate everything that's Urgent, but Not Important. Better than nothing, but this will not get you far.
Instead, I've taken the (not-so-humble) liberty of updating the matrix.