The Importance Of Delegation
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The importance of Delegation
Delegation is a way to appropriately and consistently provide direction to a staff. By delegating properly, managers can teach employees new skills and expertise to help them to be more productive and instill a sense of self-reliance, improving morale and motivation (Wikipedia, 2006). As a manager, you must assess your staff’s current abilities and their potential to accept and complete assignments through established guidelines. A manager must know how to plan and coordinate a variety of activities and how to monitor progress. Delegation brings into play many management functions planning, organizing, coordinating, motivating, communicating, and leading.
Setting goals while delegating can be beneficial to a manager and a business as a whole. When a manager sets goals they are using a portion of each management function. Karta Technologies, Inc. has goals when delegating their staff. As an organization, Karta strives to assure that there are opportunities for growth and development with the staff in which they manage. Increased morale and self-confidence within each employee is encouraged. Managers provide adequate time to concentrate on their staff and other management issues in order to be successful. Mangers get involved with the staff to assure there is commitment to a job before delegating. With these goals in place Karta feels a manager will have the ability to communicate more efficiently, without losing employees’ attention. Employees won’t take delegation as an insult, but rather a way of working together to get the job or task done.
In order to delegate effectively a manager should have skills such as trust, honesty and communication. The manager must be able to trust their staff or those employees that will help get the job done. A manger must believe in these people. The manager must be honest when discussing their expectations and clear when explaining the job to be completed. It’s important a manger ask if what was explained was understood while asking if there are any questions. This allows the individual helping to feel comfortable while asking for further clarification if needed. When utilizing these skills, managers learn to trust those they work with. This causes them to be honest with themselves. When needs are communicated clearly this allows managers to effectively delegate. If a manager is willing to change the way they do things to better themselves, they will open up additional opportunities for themselves. Paul Lemberg said, In order for managers to drive the organization beyond its current plateau, they must change the way they relate to their work (Lemberg, 1998).
While delegating can be beneficial to a company the reluctance to delegate can be detrimental to a manager and a company as a whole. Understanding why managers may be reluctant to delegate tasks and why their staff may be reluctant to accept them will help the manager become more effective when delegating. The reluctance to delegate tasks is understandable because the manager will still retain accountability; however they are limiting themselves to other opportunities.
I can think of a particular manager within Karta that isn’t good at delegating. This individual is a senior level manager and feels it’s better if she does it rather than taking the time to delegate. She is a phenomenal manager with great skill and knowledge when it comes to mentoring her staff; however she tends to take everything on by herself. While taking the workload on by herself she works tremendously long hours and finds herself never able to catch up. Just when she has completed one task, she takes on another. The list of important things to do seems to never get smaller. The list grows infinitely for this manager. She could alleviate some tremendous pressure if she would take the time to plan and delegate to others so that she would have more time to focus on other areas of her workload. This is a major disadvantage to the company. She isn’t able to take on other tasks or assignments because she is behind with everything else.
It’s important to understand why a manager is reluctant to delegate so that the individual can face those weak areas. There are times a manager may feel the transfer of a task involves a certain degree of risk. As a manager your staff may also be thinking about the risk; they are afraid they may be criticized if they should fail. As a manager