Client Question: “I am really struggling to let go of things and delegate enough to my team. What can I do to improve my delegation skills?”
By far this is one of the most challenging things to do when you are leading a team. It relies on you to trust your team to do what you are asking them to deliver. The reason that this may be a challenge is that you already know how to do these things and it would be easy to just do it yourself. You will need to take the time to explain the background, what they need to do and why you want them to do it. You can provide guidance and support, but they need to do the work. Accept the fact that it will take them longer to do it and that time needs to be built into your schedule. You also need to be prepared that they will do it differently than you would, but the goal is that they get it done and learn.
Delegation is so important, because trying to do all of the work yourself is not sustainable. The higher you go, the more responsibility you get and doing it yourself will not show that you are a leader who develops their team. A quick tip is to ask yourself this question every time you look at the list of things on your to do list, “why can’t I delegate this to someone on my team?” This will force you to justify to yourself why you should keep it. There should be very few of these things that you keep. Delegation will allow you focus on the things that a leader should be like strategy, managing relationships and team development.
Here are a few other articles that provide more detail to help you implement delegation into your work.