“If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Many first-time managers believe that, and to a large extent, it is true. However, no one can do everything. Besides, delegating and empowering employees has positive benefits. Both build employee abilities, experience, and confidence.
Yes, delegation and empowerment take time in preparation and follow- through, but the costs of avoiding it are high. A manager who does neither or does them poorly will seem disorganized and will spend a lot of time on catching up on work. If you try to do everything yourself, you will wind up exhausted, while your staff will have too much free time. Work will be bottlenecked, maybe deadlines will be missed, and work quality will be poor.
Why do managers resist delegating work to their employees or empowering their workers? Resistance may be greater to empowerment than to delegation, because empowerment entails more than assigning a task—it involves giving authority over the task. But in both instances, a major reason for opposition is managers’ concern that delegation and empowerment mean they are abdicating responsibility. Not so. Consider the definitions of both words.
Delegation involves giving an employee the responsibility for part of your job and the authority to carry it out, while retaining control and accountability. Empowerment involves not only giving responsibility and accountability for a task but also the responsibility and authority to make decisions tied to the assignment while, again, retaining control and accountability. Retaining control and accountability is the critical phrase in both definitions. It means that you avoid two managerial mistakes. The first is to dump a task, walking away and forgetting about it. The second is to appear to delegate or empower but stay so close to the employee that you are practically hovering over the shoulder. One of your goals in either delegation or empowerment is to set up a means by which you can monitor what is happening without stifling initiative.
Other concerns managers have about delegation and empowerment are:
Lack of trust. Managers who don’t delegate or empower worry that their employees won’t be able to do the job right. Better that they do it themselves and ensure that the work is done correctly, they think. But if you give the right instructions, you needn’t worry that the work won’t meet your expectations.
Loss of control. Another reason managers don’t delegate or empower is that they fear that the employees to whom they give the work won’t do it the same way they would. But no one says that there is only one way to get something done. Often, employees find more effective or efficient ways to do work previously done by their manager.
Fear of loss of position. Some managers who refuse to delegate or empower admit to a worry that an employee may show them up and take their job. They fear that the employee will demonstrate more skill at doing the work and making decisions tied to the chore than the manager—and the manager doesn’t want that to happen. But managers who don’t delegate or empower are showing their higher-ups that they can’t effectively manage the people who report to them. After all, management is getting work done through others—which is what delegation and empowerment are all about.
Admittedly, problems can arise when we delegate or empower. You can expect mistakes to happen. Our responsibility, through training and coaching, is to minimize them. We can also minimize troubles if we do both right. That’s why I use the term thoughtful when referring to both practices.
Let me start by describing how to avoid problems when delegating tasks.