Learning How to Delegate as a Leader

Learning How to Delegate (Without Making People Hate You)

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood, and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Unless your project is extremely trivial, you can’t do everything yourself. But delegating work—otherwise known as “telling other people what to do”—often goes awry. You thought the task was easy enough. How could they possibly screw it up?

Well, they do. And often, it’s your fault that the work wasn’t done to match your expectations. At least, if you’re the manager or team lead, it’s your responsibility if people fail. It’s worthwhile to learn the best ways to delegate, so that the work gets done by cheerful team members—including a cheerful you.

Leadership, schmeadership. You just want to get things done. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently it is. Because each of us easily can think of a time when we assigned a task, and things did not end well. It’s equally easy (though more embarrassing) to recall a time when we ourselves were the people who failed to get the job done.

Delegation can miss the mark in many ways. The most obvious failures are when the work does not meet specifications. The software doesn’t work, the invitations aren’t sent out on time, nobody shows up to staff the trade show booth.

Yet delegation failures can be less noticeable, at least in the sense of measurement by checkmarks on a project management calendar. ...