How to Avoid the Pitfalls of Delegating Gone Wrong
If you’re pastoring a church or leading a team, chances are you’ve felt the effects of delegating gone wrong. It can cost you time, energy, resources, and even people. For example, delegation done poorly can have you spending extra hours and lots of emotional energy fixing a massive problem created by the person you delegated a new responsibility to.
Not to mention the pain of delegating a big responsibility to someone who turned out not to be the right fit for that responsibility at all.
Delegating well and to the right people can be hard work at times. It’s critical that you take the time to slow down and really evaluate what you’re going to delegate and to whom. It can be tempting to want to rush to dump a responsibility off of your plate onto someone else’s. However, that could cost you in the long run.
Delegating the right responsibilities to the right people sets them, and you, up for long-term success! It’s a win-win, especially when our leadership mindset is that we get to raise up new leaders.
I’ve gotten this question a lot lately: “How do I know who to delegate to? What do you delegate?” I have three key steps to successful delegation that I believe will help you narrow down what to delegate and who to delegate to that will be mutually beneficial every time.
3 Key Steps to Successful Delegation
Identify what responsibilities you can delegate to others. This starts by taking your calendar and listing every responsibility you have had for the past 2-4 weeks (depending on how varied your weeks are). What tasks have you done? List them all out. Then identify what you need to do yourself, what you could delegate to others, and even what you could delay (for now) or even delete.
Consider who would benefit from taking on new or different responsibilities. These could be people whose plates are already full, and that’s okay because you can find other people to take something off of their plate. And/or these could be people who aren’t yet on your team and you know that they could benefit from taking on different responsibilities. As servant leaders, our aim in putting others first is helping them grow and succeed. So, start here, when thinking about who could benefit from different responsibilities.
Evaluate the responsibilities you can delegate to others and the people on the list you just created. Who on that list could benefit from the responsibilities you can delegate? I encourage you to take this even one step further and look at who else is on your list and whether there’s something you’re doing right now that you might actually enjoy, but that they would benefit from doing as well. Can you share this responsibility with them? Once you’ve identified what to delegate, and who to delegate to, then you want to set them up for success with their new responsibility by delegating well. You can use the simple 4-step process of model, assist, watch, and leave to best equip and empower them for growth and success every time. Click here for a downloadable guide that will walk you through how to do this step-by-step the next time you delegate to someone else.
Delegating might seem overwhelming. It can be tempting to think that because we can do all the things on our plate that we should continue to do them all. If you start from the viewpoint of wanting to help others grow and succeed, there is always a responsibility that we can give someone else. Trust me, you will be glad that you did. It’s a win-win every time.
