Delegation and Team Work

Successful leaders know that to build a viable and thriving enterprise or to further their vision, they need help of others. It’s not surprising to see many entrepreneurs and organization leaders find themselves stuck when it comes to delegation of tasks to their team members. That’s because they fall into the rut of trying to do everything themselves even as their business grows. The most common complaint they have is that – it’s difficult to find right talent willing to take on the responsibility or it’s a hard job to train people with all the fine details. Instead they find it much easier to do it themselves.

Employees on the other hand have complaints that their boss doesn’t trust them with more challenging responsibilities or they don’t see any more opportunities to grow in their job. Moreover, they are not even given authority where it’s required, but are blamed for everything that goes wrong.

Outright delegation appears like more hassle than it’s worth. However what many business leaders and managers fail to realize is that, if delegation is used effectively, they can hugely expand the amount of work that can be accomplished.

It’s self explanatory why scores of leaders and managers are under constant stress and feel close to burnout. The only way out is to understand the importance of trusting their people with some of their responsibilities (delegation) and building a culture of supportive team work. Delegation of responsibilities is not same as delegation of job. Delegation of responsibilities places emphasis on the expected outcome while delegation of job is more related to the (day-to-day) task that ought to be performed.

Successful leaders know very well that they need to create a culture where team is encouraged to take on responsibilities and are trusted with authorities that helps them make better decisions. Many organizations have lately started to promote the idea of a “champion” where a person from the team takes on a project and champions it. The objective is to create an environment where people get chance to step up and their efforts are recognized to encourage them and the people around them.

Organizations are realizing that building a successful business largely depends on creating a winning workplace. The building block of winning workplace includes respect, open communications, rewards, recognition, trust, fairness, learning, development, work life balance and team work.

As a leader you should arrange the workload in such a way that you work on the highest priority task yourself while delegate rest of the task or some of the tasks to people which is meaningful and challenging to them. The key to effective delegation is the ability to pick the right tasks to delegate, identify the right people to delegate to and delegating the task in the right way.

(Taken from The Prosperous Leader)