“I don’t empower people to please them. I empower them to make better decisions than me.”
Jurgen Appelo caught my attention with this opening line to his video on delegation.
I have often heard delegation lifted up as best practice in management for practical reasons: “I have too much on my plate. What could I delegate?” In other contexts, delegation is a means to curry favor: “I don’t want to come across like a micro-manager—I should delegate more!” Sometimes delegation is a component of talent development: “I need to find ways for my direct reports to grow. What new delegated tasks would stretch them?”
But how often do we think of delegation as a necessity to reach the best outcomes for our team, our organization and our mission? Do my direct reports really know something I don’t know? (Ouch!) The truth is, no one can see everything, and we need divergent and diverse perspectives to find the best solutions. “I empower people to make better decisions than me.”
Delegation and shared decision-making is an intentional practice that we can build into our regular work relationships and project planning rhythms. Even power-sharing is a high value within an organization’s culture, the path to achieve it can seem harder than it needs to be. Here are two key truths that can help facilitate healthy delegation:
- Clear Roles are essential. A team of which I was a member once debriefed a certain murky decision-making process. Each person wrote down the role that they believed they were asked to fulfill in the process. Then the team leader told us the roles that they thought we each held. We could only laugh when we looked at all the discrepancies between our perceived roles and our (unclearly) assigned roles. Almost nothing lined up. In order for delegation and shared decision-making to be truly effective, a frank conversation defining roles at the outset is essential.
- Delegation is rarely all or nothing. In those conversations where roles are defined, it is unlikely a manager will be comfortable checking out of the task completely. And the one accepting the delegated task will rarely want zero input from the team or manager. For good reason! Remember we need divergent and diverse perspectives from different people to find the best solutions. Negotiating a workable degree of delegation is encouraged so that people entrusted with responsibility have the support and oversight they need to succeed.
Negotiating the right level of responsibility and defining roles in decision-making are two skills that take practice for all teams. In our upcoming workshop, “Empowering Excellence: mastering delegation, power-sharing, and decision-making,” we will explore and apply tools to make this process simple and transparent for your team. I hope to see you there! Together we can make better decisions than any one person could make alone.
Join Jessica Lembelembe for a workshop this fall on Empowering Excellence: Mastering Delegation, Power-Sharing, and Decision-Making. October 18 and November 1 from noon to 1:30 eastern time.
REGISTER TODAY for $59 for this 2 day workshop. Use code OCTWKSHP23 to register for $50.