Harvey Mackay said it well, "For the sake of your company (and your sanity), at some point, you're going to need to let go." As a rational manager, I agree with Harvey wholeheartedly. As a leader, I worry about Harvey's instruction to "focus on teaching skills." The reason is that ultimately I want to delegate for success, not to set everyone up for failure.
On the surface, "letting your employees stretch their skills and judgment" sounds great. Just reading it twice gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside! But the school of hard knocks isn't so kind. I learned of some critical questions to ask, when faced with the choice to delegate a task to an employee who has never encountered the challenge.
Does the employee need training?
If you ask a systems analyst who is well versed in JavaScript to create a new, custom alert for a webpage, most likely the analyst will figure it out autonomously without needing additional guidance. But if you ask the same systems analyst to launch a new marketing campaign for baby formula sold to first-time mothers in Oklahoma City, some training is probably warranted (along with a job re-classification in this case).
There are many factors that go into deciding whether to train the employee: how adaptive (s)he is, how receptive (s)he is to change, how difficult the new task is, amount of widely available documentation, support network, etc. In the end, deciding whether or not to train an employee is a judgement call based on decidedly imperfect information.
A C# analyst asked to write simple code in Java may flounder, and on the flip side a marketing guru may turn out to be an excellent R&D engineer! In the ideal world, I believe we can groom individual contributors who are capable of searching and learning for themselves with minimal supervision.
If training is needed, how should it be delivered?
Okay, so we end up deciding that training is necessary. How do we actually deliver the training? The options are endless: shadowing, reading, simulation, in-house training modules, external training modules... Obviously, some are more expensive, while others are much more limited in its use and appeal.
How much on-the-job training is justified?
And most importantly, the question of "how much training" must be addressed. I would love to literally be a lifelong learner and never leave the student role, but then I would never become a contributing member of society. The same is true of workers int he workplace. If one spends all of his or her time in training, when is the contributor actually contributing or producing something of value to the organization?
For a full-time employee working 40 hrs/wk with 13 holidays and 24 vacation days per year, 5% of that person's time only comes out to ~1.6 hours per week. How much can you learn in that period of time? And who in their time-strapped days has the time to create such training?
Closing thoughts
I've succeeded in applying the philosopher's strategy to question deflection: Answer a question with more questions that are even more complex than the original. But seriously, the art of delegation is a skill that needs to be honed, and for me part that I really need to learn is when and how to train and develop my staff.
Do you think about all this and/or more when deciding to delegate work?
