Effective Delegation
Every communication about an assignment (“can you do this by next week?”) is fraught with peril. People misunderstand, don't hear, revisit with poor memory, or unconsciously resist direction.
Delegation is a two-way street, and the delegator is wholly responsible for the success or not of the delegation process.
You as the assigner might be:
Too vague about the needed results and what a successful outcome looks like
Ask for something that is not well-considered--it does not carefully and accurately reflect a thoughtful summary of the current need, the opportunity cost of doing this over doing something else, or some other unknown factor.
Insufficiently attentive to the check-in process. “Where are we? How is it going?”
Forget to develop and share rigorously your inventory of experience, connections, performance standards, tips, best practices, and other aids to your colleague’s performance.
The person you are asking to perform a task might:
Misunderstand the instructions and the boundaries of the assignment
Not know how the assignment aligns with other team actions and priorities
Not know what a really good product/outcome looks like
Not know the history and reasoning behind the action that is being requested
Not know where organizational knowledge is kept
Not be familiar with shortcuts and techniques available to them
Not know the people who would be able to help them most effectively
Not know what the “best practice” in this domain is or how to find it.
Not know when it is due and how often you will be checking in on progress.
A delegation worksheet is designed to remove some of these problems.
The Delegation Worksheet
When launching a significant collaboration between two or three of us, we try to write down all we're trying to accomplish on a delegation worksheet.
Using the worksheet helps clarify and expand on our work together. If the instruction is unclear, it gives the person assigned the project the chance to clarify intent, challenge the thinking, and improve the assignment.
And, the worksheet can become part of a library that helps us catalog the actions and best practices in everything we do.
It looks like this.
Case Study:
Janice needed her chief of staff to develop an evaluation process for her senior team. After thinking about it for a while, she determined that her goal was to:
find a way to increase performance
at a faster tempo
without increasing the workload of her team
She planned to ask Malaika, her chief of staff, to generate a solution and promised to send over her first draft of a delegation worksheet.
Janice filled it out first and noticed, as she was doing it, that she was probably not specific enough about the “why.” She thought some more and determined that in addition to enhancing existing performance, she also wanted to prepare the team for some new members and build this evaluation process firmly into the team’s onboarding documents. She adjusted the worksheet to reflect that insight.
She also described for Malaika, who was new to the private sector, the critical role that periodic evaluations play in improving performance and that she, Janice, felt strongly that this was an important assignment that was central to her plans for growing the company.
Prompted by the question of “who might help,” she reviewed her list of contacts to see if she could remember who might have had some experience with this kind of work. She remembered her former CEO at another company and sent him a quick note. It turned out that he had just launched a similar process, and he immediately sent her some tipsheets and a template that his team had developed for quick evaluations.
With those adjustments in place, she sent the worksheet to her chief of staff, Malaika. Her chief of staff reviewed it and sent it back with questions. Among them:
Does this supersede my work on the budgeting process? Which is more critical, given the press of time?
Does the company have a history of doing these kinds of quick reviews? (turns out they did, Janice found out, but before her time. They searched through the archives, found the history of these efforts, and put them into the worksheet).
What tempo is right? How often shall we do these evaluations? They agreed to go find out, and Janice introduced Malaika to her former CEO for a conversation.
Is there more we might not understand? They agreed to assign Elena, the business development associate, the task of searching for a group of ten articles/white papers that summarize best practices in this area and share it with them in 48 hours.
How do you see repurposing this work? They both realized that the onboarding documents were a little thin on guidelines for “how we work together” and agreed to generate some more collaborative norms so that the quick evaluation process would be linked more clearly to the employee onboarding process.
And they realized that to make this really effective, they had to revisit with the existing team some of the mission and vision statements around internal collaboration, which had been neglected for a while in the rush of company growth.
Malaika and Janice both revised the assignment together three times before launching, each time finding essential ways to enhance outcomes and reduce confusion and workload significantly.