Delegation doesn’t necessarily come naturally to everyone. If you had parental influence anything like mine, the mantra’s were “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” and “If you want a job done well, do it yourself”.
Yes literally, that’s what I grew up with. I watched my Dad an amazingly hardworking man achieve so much. Where do your leadership beliefs come from?
However, with this belief, for many years, I was challenged in leadership roles with delegating and letting go. I struggled to hand over tasks, projects and responsibility.
I’ll also fess up at this point, if you haven’t read previous blogs, I’m also still a control-freak. I LOVE control, so the delegating came even harder back then, because I was a boots-all-in, keep my fingers in the pie, hands on kind of gal!
Which is great to a point and then a disaster 🙁
Totally good for getting stuff done, however….
When we’re not delegating and over-controlling, it has a significant impact on our team around us. People will actually stop trying. They lose interest, stop showing initiative, thinking for themselves – because we’ll always have an answer or want the last say. It’s incredibly demotivating for people.
They might not feel they can live up to high or expectations, do it well enough, right or even contribute, because we shut them down, don’t listen and/or listen and then override their opinions, input and work and do the decision backing themselves.
Ever done that? Am not alone am I…..?!
Here’s the thing, be mindful of how critical delegation is, not only to balance workload and ensure priorities are getting done, it’s very important for building capability across the team.
Otherwise they will stop trying, caring and eventually… potentially, give up and leave.
Yes leave, this is big for retention of your team members.
How are your delegating skills going?
What’s on your plate right now that you could invite some contribution on?
Hand-over to some-one?
Who is making the decisions?
Could you provide some more ‘teaching/training” to support the delegation process?
Do you need to follow-up on a recent meeting and deliverables? Not to control, simply to check in and ask “How are you tracking with X? Need a hand? Any questions? And say thank you. Be grateful, validate, acknowledge and recognise the input, effort and contribution of your team members. It goes a long way.
Big love and here’s to continuously building the delegating muscle 😉
Gen
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