Delegation – understanding your team’s talents and leveraging them.

One aspect of successful leadership is knowing your team members and what they have to contribute. This point may sound self-evident, but you’d be amazed how often managers have no idea of what their team really can do – either in combination or separately.

Why is do managers fall into this trap? Perhaps managers in this situation are:

• Too busy and pay “lip service” to their team.
• Self-isolated in the sense they have created a social structure where there is a strong distinction between who “on-top” and who’s “below.”
• More interested in the “divide and conquer” principle of management – where the manager maintains high levels of competition within their team to ensure they maintain control of the team.
• Focussed on centring the workflow around themselves so they can keep control and feel like they are “managing.”

Often managers who partake in these activities use “ad hoc” delegation. Ad hoc delegation works like this:

1. The manager needs someone to “do a job” for them – perhaps this job is menial or the manager doesn’t like the task.
2. The manager chooses one of his team for the task on the basis of favours – who they like or dislike, depending on the role.
3. The team member undertakes the job. No performance expectation is given and often there is a lot of missing information the team member has to construct to understand what the job is (sometimes the manager has all of this information and makes in unavailable for reasons fuelled by their own agenda).
4. The job outcomes become known and the manager makes a subjective judgement on the team member’s performance.
5. Often this performance was not as good as the manager wished it to be or was not up to the managers’ expert standard.

The outcome of this scenario reinforces:

• The managers’ dominance in the team as the objectives setter, controller, and evaluator.
• The team members’ subservience to the manager.
• The managers’ belief of his capability over the less-experienced team.
• The team members’ belief the manager is not working with them and at worst, is actively working against them.
• The managers’ belief that he can’t delegate real responsibility to his team members because they “aren’t ready,” or at worst they are “incompetent.”
• The team members’ belief that working for this manager is a waste of time and there are better opportunities elsewhere.

While you may be thinking the example is extreme and perhaps a stereotype, reflect for a moment on whether you have subconsciously led your subordinates to similar outcomes. I know I have and I should know better!