Delegation for Dummies

You can find any number of treatises on delegation in management textbooks.  Here’s a more nuts-and-bolts approach that allows you to get started right away.

When you delegate a task to others, you need to empower them. It’s required in any field.  It’s especially important in FDA regulated industries.

Mention the word empowerment in any plant and you’ll see everyone nodding in agreement.  It’s almost a paradigm that empowered employees mean a productive workplace.  But look deeper and you’ll see fear in their eyes. 

Managers fear empowerment because they may lose control.  They remember the last time they ‘empowered’ one of their employees and that employee made a mistake.  Who got blamed for that mistake?  The manager.  And that’s the last time the manager will ever loosen the leash on the employees. 

Employees fear empowerment because they remember the last time they got ‘empowered’.  They had a great idea.  They put a lot of work into developing that idea.  But when they presented it to their boss they got trashed. 

“No,” they were told, “That isn’t what I had in mind at all.”  And that’s the last time the employees will ever demonstrate any initiative.  No way.  They are going to just do exactly what they are told, and no more. 

Empowerment defined.  So empowerment is a concept that gets a lot of lip service but not much action.  And it’s no wonder.  Few people even know what it means, let alone how to use it. 

Empowerment is NOT synonymous with power.  Empowerment is authority, limited authority, plus accountability.  We all like having authority. 

Accountability on the other hand just doesn’t have the same glamour.  Understanding the limits of authority and how to maintain accountability are usually the rocks that shipwreck the empowerment process. 

In the complex world of business we can’t let employees just do what they want.  Their level of authority must be scaled based on their abilities.  This would seem to be obvious yet most attempts to empower a workforce completely neglect this fact. 

Typically management taps the empoyees with a magic wand, says, “You’re empowered,”  then abandons them.  Therefore the empowerment process is doomed from the start.

What are the implementation steps if you want to empower your workforce?  Well, that depends on how far you want to go.  You can set up extensive training programs to upgrade the workforce and set up procedures that allow expanded decision making power commensurate with demonstrated skills. 

These steps will certainly pay off but they take time and a coordinated effort of a lot of people.  You don’t have to wait.  You can start right now to empower your employees in small ways every day as you assign normal work. 

Matching the job and the person.  You should adjust the magnitude of the assignment to the capabilities of the employee.  The project should stretch the employee’s capabilities enough that they can learn a few things, yet not be so difficult that they have to come to you all the time with questions. 

We call this approach situational leadership.  The manager has to know how much the employee can bite off and digest.  As the employee gains more skills the limits of authority and accountability should be expanded. 

Try to give the employee the whole job.That way the employee feels ownership.Don’t dole it out piecemeal.If you do that, either you’re a control freak or you should try to assign the project to someone with more experience.If the job is too big for one person to handle, give it to a team of people.

How do you define ‘the whole job’?  Well, the project should include enough that the employees can clearly perceive the value that it provides. 

The excuse that some managers give for keeping their employees under such a tight leash is that they want to make the employees’ accountability clear.  What they don’t realize, though, is that by defining each little step that the employee has to perform the employee is actually relieved of accountability.  Because if things don’t happen exactly as the manager envisioned, the employee can say, “I did just what you told me to do.” 

Next time:  Setting the Framework for a Delegated Job