Healthy organisation hierarchy is marked by efficient delegation
“ - Andrew Carnegie
Delegation is a skill as well as a decision to be taken. When most of your organization makes this decision correctly, it is a strong indicator that all levels of your organization hierarchy are working in the way that they are supposed to.
It is a great way to ensure that more tasks get done in less time, and it also builds team capacity.
Delegation benefits managers, direct reports, and the whole organization.
Yet it remains one of the most underutilized and underdeveloped management capabilities.
A 2007 study on time management found that close to half of the 332 companies surveyed were concerned about their employees’ delegation skills.
Why is this not done well in most organizations? A major factor is the failure of organizations to assure that the supervisors and managers know how to delegate effectively.
Many managers have never received training in delegation. The same study showed that only 28% of those companies offered any training on the topicwhich indicates the degree to which this crucial skill is ignored currently.
Apart from the usual skill challenges in being able to delegate (and there are plenty- I can do it better myself, I don’t have time to involve others, I can’t delegate something I don’t know how to do myself and so on)- our experience of having worked with organizations indicates that many of them are also structurally not equipped for effective delegation. n
In some of the cases, key positions accountable for structural drivers of the organization strategy are manned by ineffective or mediocre talent which require people in leadership positions to have to ‘step down’ and consequently get bogged in operational decision making.
In a few other cases, the roles are poorly defined without leaving enough elbow room for requisite decision making without stepping into each other’s shoes. Because of this, on the few rare occasions that managers actually get down to delegate- they merely end up ‘dumping’ work on people.
Real delegation is assigning responsibility f or outcomes along with the authority to do what is needed to produce the desired results. You may want to re-look at your organization structure if you observe the following happening in your organization: • Diminished capacity, capa- bility and agility issues arising from higher-level executives taking on more tactical responsibilities, minimizing the value of their leadership skills.
• Staff getting bogged down with irrelevant inter functional or departmental meetings
• When most staff members are only focusing on their immediate responsibilities, demonstrating little innovation, time, energy or desire to take on challenges outside their current job scope • Managers taking a long time to make decisions that should have been completed in-time by people at their level An organization structure should be ‘requisite’, i.e. the complexity of work being handled by an employee at each level of the organization hierarchy should match his/her capability for doing the job.
Only then would an employee be energized to take the right decisions at the workplace, including the decision to delegate at the right time.
Hence, it becomes your responsibility as the manager of your team or organization to ensure that organization levels either spaced out enough from each other to create space for decision making and at the same time adding the right type of value to organization decisions.
Asking yourselves this crucial question of ‘Are the levels in my organization requisite?’ the key to getting rid of most of the issues related to being able to effectively delegate.