Kevin Gardner, Negosentro.com | As a manager, one of the most important skills you need to perfect is how to delegate. When you master the art of delegation, your productivity and success will leap to extraordinary levels. Knowing how to delegate effectively is not a skill that most people are born with. It takes smart thinking and careful planning to delegate successfully. When you learn how to delegate tasks effectively, it will transform your business. Use the following seven tricks to delegate better as a boss.
- Learn the Art of Letting Go
Ultimately, the art of delegation comes down to your willingness to let go of your work. You need to be comfortable letting your subordinates perform tasks on their own if you want to streamline your business. When you learn to let go and trust your employees to do their jobs, they will impress you with their capabilities. When you are completely comfortable letting go, your will begin to excel at delegating responsibilities.
- Learn How to Prioritize
Perhaps the most important thing you need to learn to become a great delegator is how to prioritize tasks. To become good at prioritizing tasks at work, you need to develop a system for arranging tasks by their level of importance. You should aim to have four or five priority levels for your work tasks. When you rank them by importance, you will know which important tasks you need to assign to team members who excel at getting things done.
- Embrace Employees Who Learn New Skills
To be a successful delegator, you need to have employees who are willing to learn by taking on new tasks. When your employees embrace learning new skills, you will never have to worry about assigning them difficult tasks. When you emphasize teaching your employees new skills, you can count on them to step up and tackle jobs no matter how difficult they are.
- Trust Doesn’t Mean You Don’t Need to Check Their Work
While trusting your employees to get delegated tasks done on their own is important, that doesn’t mean that you don’t need to provide the appropriate level of supervision. When it comes to the quality of your employees’ work, it is ultimately your reputation that is on the line. That means that you need to check their work to ensure that it is up to the high-quality standards you expect.
- Have an Open Door
One of the most important parts of being good at delegating is recognizing the importance of open communication with your employees. They need to feel like they can always come to you with an executive assessment of your performance as a manager. When they do reach out to you, make sure that you listen to their concerns with care. Address their concerns with the appropriate level of empathy to keep them dedicated to doing their jobs with care.
- Start Small
If you are new to management and delegating tasks, the best way to proceed is to go slowly. Start small by trusting your workers with little tasks. When they prove their responsibility, trust them with bigger and bigger tasks moving forward.
- Check in on Big Projects
Delegation doesn’t mean that you don’t have to supervise. Especially on big projects, you need to make sure that your employees regularly check in with you to let you know how things are going. This allows you to head off any problems early before they bloom into full-on catastrophes. Short daily notes and detailed weekly reports should be enough to keep your filled in.
When you become a master of delegating tasks to your team members, the amount of work you get done will leap to a high level that earns you recognition. It is not hard to master the art of delegation. Simply use the seven tips above, and your delegation ability will rise to an expert level that allows you to excel in the business world.
