Meetings for Delegating Assignments
One of your most important skills for success in management is your ability to delegate assignments in the right way to the right people. These one-on-one or small group meetings can be some of the most important work that you ever do.
Effective delegation meetings can free up an enormous amount of your time to do more productive work and to do the work that only you can do.
Your ability to delegate effectively to others is the key to leveraging yourself and multiplying your value to your company. Without the ability to delegate effectively, you will find it is impossible to move up or to advance in management to higher positions of responsibility.
The Starting Point
The starting point of delegation is for you to think through the job. What exactly needs to be done? To what standard does it need to be done? What is the required date of completion?
Often, a simple job does not need to be done by a more experienced and valuable person. You assign tasks based on the knowledge, skill, and hourly income of the person you want to do the job.
Choose the Right Person
Once you are clear about the job that needs to be done, you then select the right person to do the job and arrange a meeting with that person. Match the requirements of the job to the abilities of the person. When you delegate the job to the right person, you are then free to focus your attention on other things.
The more responsibilities that you give to people, the stronger and more positive they become. When you sit down with someone and delegate the entire job to that employee, this responsibility becomes a major motivator of performance.
Explain Clearly
Explain exactly what you want done—the how, the what, and the why of the task. Explain clearly the outcomes and results that are required. Make these results measurable.
Especially, in this type of one-on-one meeting, invite participation and encourage discussion. The more opportunity that employees have to discuss a job with the boss before they begin, the more committed they will be to completing the task, to the required standard and on schedule. There seems to be a one-to-one relationship between how much people get to talk about the job and how much they understand it, accept it, and are committed to doing it.
The more your employees and team members can discuss the job, the more they internalize ownership of the job and see doing the job as something that is personal to them rather than simply helpful to the company.
Ask for Feedback
Once you have explained the job, what needs to be done and when, and to what standard, ask the other person to feed it back to you in his own words. When delegating a job, never assume that the other person understood exactly what you asked him to do.
This was a lesson I learned as a young manager. I was astonished to find that, even after I had clearly assigned a specific job to a specific person, either the job was not done well or it was not done at all. Often the staff member left the meeting unsure about the exact job to be done; as a result, the worker was paralyzed, like a deer in the headlights, and did nothing at all. To my amazement, even after a thirty-or sixty-minute conversation, in fully 50 percent of cases, the other person had misheard or misremembered what we just talked about.
Ever after, I learned to always ask others to feed back to me, in their own words, exactly what I had asked them to do.
Set a Deadline and Schedule
Once you and the delegatee are clear about the task to be done, set a clear deadline and sub-deadlines on every task. An assignment without a deadline is merely a discussion.
Remember that delegation is not abdication. Even though you are assigning someone to do the job, you are still accountable for whether the job is done properly and on schedule.
Next set a schedule for reporting. This reporting can be a part of your weekly one-on-one meetings, or it can be a separate communication, either delivered personally or by e-mail. When your employees know that they have to meet or talk with you on a regular basis about the progress of the job, they are much more likely to do the job on schedule, much to the benefit of the company, and to themselves personally as well.
Finally, once you have delegated the job, express your confidence in your staff. Tell them that you are sure that they will do a great job and that you look forward to seeing how everything works out. An expression of confident expectations by the boss in the staff member is one of the most powerful of all motivations for excellent work.
This final statement of confidence is often the motivating spark that causes a person to take ownership of the assignment and to commit internally to doing an excellent job. After this kind of meeting, if you handle it properly, you can then turn your attention to other things with a high degree of assurance that the job will be done on time and as you expected.