Tasks that Leaders Can Delegate
As a leader, delegating is essential. Let’s face the facts, you can’t—and you shouldn’t—do everything alone. Delegating empowers your team, assists with professional development, and, most importantly, builds trust. Delegating will also help you in identifying who is best suited to take on future tasks or projects confidently. Stating the obvious here, delegating tasks can lighten your workload, but it does much more than getting stuff off your plate once done effectively.
For example, your team will be able to develop new skills and gain knowledge, which prepares them for more responsibility in the future.
Delegation can also clearly show that you respect your subordinates’ abilities and trust their discretion. Employees who feel trusted and respected tend to have a higher level of commitment to their work, their organization, and, especially, their managers.
How do you delegate tasks effectively; there are a few things to consider.
- Choose the right person for the task
- Explain why you are delegating; providing context goes a long way
- Provide sufficient instructions
- Allow for training and access to resources
- Delegate responsibility and authority to make decisions empower the individual to carry on with the task. Nurture an environment and culture where people feel they can make decisions, ask questions, and take the necessary steps to complete the work.
- Inspect what you expect. Follow up on the work you delegated to your team members when it’s complete, make sure they did it correctly, and give them any feedback needed to improve when handling the task.
- Don’t forget to say thank you. Take the time to show genuine appreciation and point out specific things they did right or well. When you note those specifics, you’re giving people a roadmap for what they should continue to do to be successful. This is the most straightforward step but one of the hardest for many people to learn. It will inspire loyalty, provide satisfaction for work, and become the basis for mentoring and performance reviews.
Now that we discuss things to consider, let’s list the tasks that leaders can delegate effectively and when it makes more sense for a leader to spend time on higher priorities versus low priorities. Having an administrative professional to help with these tasks is also an excellent investment if you do not have to support yourself.
- Calendar management & booking meetings
- Travel booking
- Expense management
- HR management tasks: performance review process, vacation approval, onboarding, and offboarding staff logistics.
- Departmental budget cycle management
- Office Operation management
- File management and record retention schedules
- Meetings Management: invites, tracking attendance, compiling of agendas, meeting minutes, and follow-ups on action items.
- Special ad-hoc projects; one-off type of projects: e.g., office move/refresh
- Presentation slides: tasks related explicitly to formatting or designing slides.
- Culture building: staff activities and social events that increase morale and cultivate the team-building spirit and strengthen relationships
- Annual celebrations & gifting ideas
- Event management and planning, restaurant reservations and catering
- Department communication: internal messaging, announcements, monthly newsletter, etc.
- Crisis management and business continuity
- Market Research: content, competitors, and informational data
- Social media management
- Process and improvement procedures/protocols
- Registrations to events, professional development, or conferences
- Facility management and vendor negotiations.
Final Thoughts
If you delegate effectively, you can increase trust and commitment with your employees, improve productivity, and make sure the right people perform the tasks that best suit them. Delegating is not about offloading your work; it’s about providing learning opportunities to your staff.
Please do not mistake offloading your work as a development opportunity for someone else. A thoughtful leader will balance and evaluate the difference between low-value learning opportunities and high meaningful ones. A leader is encouraged to allow new pathways to learning opportunities that provide growth, balance challenge, and suit the individual involved. Offloading your work is not a development opportunity for others.
