The Importance of Delegation? and When Should We Do It?

The end of 2023 is almost coming. We want to congratulate you who have given your best this year, and for those who are preparing for a new position as a novice leader at the beginning of next year. If this is your first experience in leading a work group, it means that you will start to face new challenges to work not only for yourself, but work for more people in the work group. 

As novice leaders, leading can be quite challenging, especially if they have never led a work group before. When elected as a leader, usually someone will be considered qualified and know what they are supposed to do. While in reality, if a novice leader is not prepared with enough knowledge and competence, the potential for turmoil within the group becomes greater.

One of the things that is often missed is to delegate their tasks to subordinates. For some leaders who are chosen because of their expertise, sometimes they do not realize that they need to delegate tasks. Apart from being accustomed to doing their own work, sometimes they find it difficult to trust the abilities of others. 

The key point in delegating tasks to subordinates is to provide opportunities for their subordinates to develop themself and to be more responsible for their assigned tasks. The questions for leaders are, how can we know when we should delegate tasks to our subordinates? 

Before we give you the tips, we need you to understand that there are two elements in task delegation:

1. Individual readiness: the skill level of the person you are delegating to? And their willingness to do the tasks?
2. Urgency of the task: how important is the task to be completed? Can it be postponed or must it be completed as soon as possible?

After understanding these two elements, we can divide them into four quadrants, which are organized based on the intersection of the Individual Readiness axis and the Importance or urgency axis of the task.

From the quadrant above, we can see that full delegation can only be done for jobs that are low in urgency, with high individual readiness. While for low individual readiness and high urgency, we should not delegate, and it is better to handle the task independently. For the other two quadrants, it is still possible to delegate, but monitoring must be done to ensure working quality.

If a task that you usually do takes up more time than other more important tasks, you need to consider whether the task needs to be delegated to someone else. A simple rule to convince yourself to delegate is, if someone else can complete the task at least 70% as well as you can, then you should have the courage to delegate the task to them. There may be a drop in the quality of performance, but 30% is quite tolerable compared to the loss of your time on more important tasks.

Uta Rohrschneider in the book Learn Motivating Delegation as a Leader shares 7 rules that can be applied for an effective delegation, among others:

Task Description

A leader must provide comprehensive information about the task, what must be done? What tasks must be completed? expectations of task results? is there tolerance for mistakes that occur? What is the difficulty of the work to be assigned? It all must be clearly spoken and in detail.

Choosing the right people

A leader should be able to choose people who have the most adequate competence in carrying out the task, including who can help, and who is most motivated in carrying out the task.

Write down the Work-Order

A leader should provide clear and written directions for carrying out tasks. Important information needed such as important dates, deadlines, including expectations for the achievement of task objectives need to be written and delivered to the team with the right media for awareness.

Provide authority

Leaders need to provide a clear scope of authority to anyone delegated. This is necessary to provide clear space for delegated subordinates to make decisions.

Check

Delegation is about trust, therefore the leader must provide time to check if there is progress in the work. The portion of monitoring must also be done as wisely as possible, not to loosen, but also do not micromanage.

Ready to answer questions

Leaders should make time to be asked by subordinates. You have to trust your subordinates, but as a leader, you must be ready to answer if asked by your subordinates, so that they do not feel left alone in completing the task.

Discussing results

This stage is sometimes forgotten even though it is very important. In a delegation process, the result delivered in a task is actually a valuable learning process for the giver and receiver of the task, this moment of discussion will be full of learning and strengthening competencies for the development and regeneration of these personnel in the future.

Being a leader who can delegate tasks effectively is not an easy task, and if you find it difficult to delegate tasks, you should not feel embarrassed. This is one of those leadership skills that takes time to develop. We hope this article has given you some insights that can help you in your new role as a leader. 

Artikel by:
Gardhika Waskita Pakqi
Resident Assessor
prasmul-eli Assessment Services