How to delegate effectively in three steps (without micromanaging or burning out)

You have to figure out what are some of those high impact things. Maybe it’s running a big meeting that has a ton of visibility and exposure. Maybe it’s talking to a really, really high powered client, whatever it is, a piece of that work that’s really important. We got to figure out ways to be delegating that otherwise we’re going to be creating this distance in this perception that I have to do all of these important things and my team members are only relegated to the things that I have deemed as insignificant.

Welcome to the managing made simple podcast where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback to delegating and more. We will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips, or a seasoned manager looking to up their game, everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple.

Let’s go. As a team leader or business owner, you’re no stranger to wrestling with some of the toughest situations that come up as a manager. But sometimes you need a little bit more support, and you don’t have the time to spend researching on the internet or taking a bunch of canned training. That is why I am so excited to share the Managing Made Simple Hub, your one stop shop to everything you need to be a great manager.

The Hub is an interactive community offering a monthly live Q& A ask me anything call where you can bring up anything that’s top of mind along with curated resources and tools, monthly challenges, exclusive discounts on my services and conversations with experts. Best thing is there’s no longterm commitment and you can hop in and out anytime. Sign up today at liagarvin.com/hub and I cannot wait to see you in our next live Q& A session. Welcome back to the show.

Today, we’re going to talk about all things delegating and this came up recently in a workshop. I was leading for a team in in the tech industry and they were wrestling with something. I think all of us are struggling with right now, which is meetings overload. We’re in meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting. And this was a group of managers that was talking about, you know, how do we create more time for ourselves? Because we’re feeling squeezed, it’s starting to create more tensions across the team, it’s starting to create a little bit of divisiveness, and it felt like, well, you know, if there’s so many meetings, it’s usually a symptom of another problem.

And so if you’re experiencing meeting overload, or if you’re a business owner and you’re feeling like I’m always, I’m always in every conversation, I have no space, I have no time to breathe, I have no time to do any creative work where I’m working, you know, 60, 80 hours a week. This is a symptom of a bigger issue. And one of those issues might be the need to delegate. And so that’s what we’re gonna talk about today.

Delegating is something that also comes up a lot with the small business owners that I’m talking to. Maybe you’re, you’ve hired a virtual assistant, the person’s remote, you don’t see them all the time, you assign them a task or something, and you just hope that it’s going to be done well. And I think for a lot of us, we get stuck no matter what sort of environment you’re in. When we’re delegating. We get stuck in thinking someone’s going to read our mind or do the thing exactly as we would.

And then when they don’t read our mind or they do it differently, we feel frustrated and we say, I should have just done it myself. It would have been faster. Well, it’s only faster to do it yourself in the short term, because when you are able to delegate effectively, and you’re able to really make it clear what you need and allow someone to run with it, Now, you’ve unlocked so much more space and time for yourself so you can scale yourself better as a leader.

And you have allowed that person to bring their own creative spin to it. So you have the potential of making the thing even better. So that’s what we want to delegate. Not only does it save you time, it can grow your team members. It can help you scale. It is all sorts of things. It’s such an important skill to be doing. And we’re going to talk about exactly how to do that today. The first thing we got to do when we’re delegating is understand the strengths and development areas of our team members.

Because if we don’t really know what that is, how are we really going to delegate effectively? This means getting to know what are some of the superpowers of your team members. What are the places that they’re really excited to be developing? For example, if one team member is a great, great relationship builder and they’re great at influencing, that’s an area you may want to figure out something to delegate for them because they’re going to really crush it in that space.

Thanks. On the other hand, if someone’s really building in a certain area, they’ve told you, I have a goal to become a better presenter. I’m really working on my public speaking skills. I’m really working on, you know, my facilitation meeting management. That could be another opportunity to delegate because this is going to allow them to really grow in that area. Once we understand our strengths and development areas of our team members, that helps us identify what to delegate.

And then when we’re telling someone, Hey, I’d love to hand this thing off, it’s really helpful to say, Hey, because I know you’re really passionate about this area, you’re influencing skills or, or communicating with stakeholders, whatever. That’s why I’m asking you to step up into this, or because you have this goal of developing in this area. That’s why I’ve asked you to do this. And this is a really powerful tool for building relationships for showing your team members.

I see you. I hear you. I’m wanting to create opportunities for you. This also serves as a way to recognize your team members. This is like step one by understanding your team member strengths and development areas and by delegating specific things in those buckets. Now you’re showing them that you are here to help them achieve their goals. It has this one, two punch because also delegating is going to clear up space for you. But you’ve also built a stronger relationship with your team member in the process.

Step two is the willingness to let go of some meaningful work, meaty work that is going to help me go after my career goals. And our team members know when we’re delegating something that’s so obviously no one wants to do. And I’ve been in this situation before where my manager said, Hey, I got this great project for you to take on. It’s going to get you this exposure and research and all these things. And it ended up being taking notes in a meeting.

And I was like, well, okay, let’s just call a spade a spade here. And I felt really frustrated. So I just said step one, understanding the strengths and development areas builds a lot of trust. And the best way to break that trust immediately is to then hand off a task that obviously no one wants to do and frame it up as something awesome. It’s totally fine to say, Hey, we have this thing. I need someone to take notes in this meeting and I’m asking you cause I know you have a few cycles.

Would you mind stepping in? Okay. It’s totally fine to ask your team members to do something that’s not the best task in the world. My point here is we don’t want to frame it up and package up the turd and some fancy, you know, gift and pretend like your team member’s an idiot. Okay, that’s the difference here. When we’re delegating, we do want to be thinking about what is some high impact work I can hand off.

Maybe it’s some work that you like doing. Maybe it’s work that you want to be doing. And as a leader, you always need to be growing your bench, cultivating the next line of leaders. It’s important to not just hand off the BS tasks that you don’t want to do. You have to figure out what are some of those high impact things. Maybe it’s running a big meeting that has a ton of visibility and exposure. Maybe it’s talking to a really, really high powered client.

Whatever it is, a piece of that work that’s really important, we gotta figure out ways to be delegating that. Otherwise, we’re gonna be creating this distance and this perception that I have to do all of these important things and my team members are only relegated to the things that I have deemed as insignificant. We’re never going to be able to grow our team members to, to be the best leaders they can be to be best at whatever skill they’re developing.

If we don’t give them that space, I encourage you to look across all the things that are on your plate today, this week, this month, whatever it is, and circle things or write down what are five or six high impact tasks that you could hand off to a team member. And then we’re going to move into the third step, which is setting clear expectations What you need to see here when you’ve identified what you want to hand off.

This doesn’t mean you just have to send someone an email like, Hey, can you take this on and like hope for the best? No way. Okay. The most important step with delegating is setting crystal clear expectations and we can get very specific here. And I think one sort of nuance people don’t always realize is when we set expectations really clearly up front. That’s not micromanaging. Micromanaging is the along the way continual check ins and like, well, where are we at all that, that’s the micromanaging.

Okay. It’s when you said you would, you know, let’s check in once a week and then every day you’re like, Hey, can you even update that’s the micromanaging. But if you set super clear expectations up front saying, Hey, I want to hand off this really important task. Okay. I know it’s one of the areas that you were really excited about developing, right? So we start with understanding the strengths and development areas. And we say, Hey, I identified this really important set of meetings that I want to hand off to you.

But because they’re really important, I want to set really clear expectations up front so that you can be successful. Okay. So I’ve done step one, two, and three. Now as I’m setting expectations, I can be as clear as I need to be. For this set of meetings, it’s really important to have content ready two days before we got to send out the pre read. It’s an executive team or this client always asks to see this content early.

So can we commit like, yes, we’re going to get that done two days before. Then here’s the structure of the meeting, how we want to run it. Okay. One, two, three. Good. At the end, we want to capture actions. And then, you know, for the first few meetings, let’s touch base after and just check in on how it went and what adjustments we want to make. Okay. This is very clear expectations. That the team member can come back to, they can ask questions, they can say, okay, like this makes sense or not.

And you’ve made it clear really specific milestones. Two days before, how you want the meeting to be run, that you’re gonna have these meetings after to talk about feedback. Now, if you want to check in and talk about feedback, it’s not weird like, hey, I attended the meeting and now I just thought of something to say. You already set that up front. When we set clear expectations, we’re not only saying around how we want that task to go and any specifics there, It’s really important to also set expectations about checking in with the team, how you want to review things, where you want to be looped in, whatever.

And that allows us to let go. Because the most important thing about delegating is actually delegating it and not jumping back in like, Oh, I just want to grab onto that piece. But letting your team member run with it. Because as I mentioned at the start of this episode, one of the biggest benefits of delegating is that your team member can do something maybe better than you ever would have, or differently, or more creatively, and you get new ideas into the ether.

That is what we want to see. That’s like the best scenario, that someone is like, Ooh, I took what we did here and I thought this could make it even better. Let’s see about that. We are not able to ever get to that point if we’re saying something has to be done exactly how we want it to be. So when we’re setting clear expectations, we do want to leave a little bit of space for someone to bring their own spin to it.

With the example of that meeting, once we have those check ins after the meeting, as I said, so we’re going to check in right after the meeting, talk about how it went. We can say, Hey, any things we want to do differently? I’d love to hear your ideas here. We want to be asking our team members, showing them, this is not just something that has to be run the way that I said, I want to hear from you.

What ideas do you have? What suggestions do you have in leaving that door open? Now, there’s one more step here, especially if you have your own set of managers that you have to answer to. And I think one step that we often miss with delegating when we have our own management chain to lean into is that we got to be managing up and telling our own managers that we’ve delegated something. Because I’ve noticed in my experience, one of the times when I feel like I had a great thing that my manager handed off to me, but then they keep checking in on it.

Is when they’re getting a lot of pressure from their own manager on what’s the status of that thing to avoid this when you’re ready to delegate something, hand something off to tell your own manager that, Hey, I have handed off this big thing. I’ve set the expectation that we’re going to check in every Tuesday afternoon, and I will loop you in at that point, because then you’re not feeling the squeeze of, I have to check in on this thing that I was trying to delegate.

But now I’m getting pressure to know what’s going on with it. You’ve set the expectation with your own manager on what’s going on with that. Managing up is a piece of delegating if we are really wanting to be able to let go and let that person run with something. And that is it. This is our secret to delegating effectively. We’ve got to understand those strengths and development areas for our team members and then link anything we’re delegating to those so that they see this is a worthwhile thing to be taking on.

I’m not just asked to be doing some extra stuff that I don’t have time for, but this is really worth it. Then we have to be willing to let go of some high impact work. Okay, we cannot just delegate the things that nobody else wants to do. And last, we have to set clear expectations and let go. And when we have done those things, we start to see, we have more time in our day. We can refocus our time into more high impact work.

We’re growing the team, focusing on vision and strategy because we figured out exactly the things that we don’t need to be doing. And because we’ve done that, we have elevated our team members to be stepping up as leaders. We’re growing our bench. We are creating a leadership team that can be proactive and creative and, and, and take on big responsibilities. That’s the ultimate goal, that you’re growing a team that can help you scale. Because if you’re feeling like, Oh, I can’t delegate because I just, people aren’t quite there yet.

That’s a signal for you to get your team members that support. If you can’t delegate anything from your week to anybody on your team, or you can’t think of how you would possibly use a new hire, a contractor, a VA, whatever. Then it’s a moment to say, okay, what do I have going on? How do I like to work? Let me map out some of those expectations. How would I hand that off? What kinds of skills does someone need to be able to take this on and then start figuring out how you’re gonna close those gaps?

There is rarely a time when every single thing that we are doing in our day, in our week, in our jobs is exactly everything we should be doing, right? There’s always opportunities as we grow, as we learn, as we evolve. To be handing things off and in turn, we develop our teams and everybody wins. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the managing made simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

I always love to hear from you. So please reach out at LiaGarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.