Liz Strauss

When a manager finally comes to the conclusion that he or she needs help to finish a project on time, often the timing of that idea is usually 2-3 weeks or more past an ideal time. Instead the decision has waited until the manager is under stress and deadline pressure with many plates to keep spinning and many balls to keep in the air.

The manager looks at the project and sometimes decides that no part of it can be delegated. This conclusion is patently false. In 30 years as a manager, I have not found a project that did not have parts that were appropriate to delegating. The way to find them is in how you look at the project.

Finding Tasks to Delegate

Delegating appropriately requires a flexible mind that moves easily from part to whole and whole to part. In this context, a part is a discrete task that can be completed without reliance on the rest of the project or with minor checking against another part of the project.

On a blog a discrete task might be checking all post titles for the use of key words.

Use this process to identify appropriate tasks to delegate.

1. Identify discrete tasks. Look for small tasks. Look top down, bottom up, and latterally. Mentally think through each step of the process and consider how another you might take part of the work load without interrupting what you are doing.
2. Determine the level of project knowledge required to do each task.Checking page numbers, for example, requires only the ability to make sure numbers are in sequence and all are present. Checking content requires experience in the industry to understand what choices are costly and time consuming. It also requires project knowledge and history of decisions already made about content grary areas.
3. Determine the skill set needed for each task that could be delegated.
4. Find the folks who have that skillset in house or hire them from a temporary agency.
5. Have a short sample of the work prepared to test the candidate’s performance on the task.
6. Determine how you will verify to your own satisfaction that the candidate is strong enough to ask questions when necessary, but to work alone without much direction.

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Once you’ve gone through these steps you are ready to meet with the candidate to present the work. At this point is when you begin to reap the benefits of the time you have invested.

These steps are designed to ensure that the delegation process is successful. Following them will get you to your goal faster. Taking a shorter timeline in delegating, almost always results inthe work being done over — thereby losing more time than appeared to be gained when the proejct was delegated.

Behind every Successful business, there is an Outstanding Manager.

Liz