How to Delegate Work Effectively: 5 Steps to Let Go of Control and Start Doing More

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, right? The perfectionist in you likes to be in control and is good at finding excuses – “Outcome won’t be as good.” “It will take me longer to assign and explain than to do it myself.” “I don’t have anyone with the right skills.” “No one in the team wants to do it anyway.” 

There’s this itch to jump and solve every problem yourself. Got a presentation – no one can do it better than me. Got a production issue – it ain’t getting fixed if I am not involved. Got a client call – I need to seal this deal. Got a critical feature release – I better do it myself. The risk of not getting it right is way too high. 

“Picture this. I am your supervisor, and I walk over to you with pencil in hand and tell you to take it. You reach for the pencil, but I won’t let go. So I say, ‘What is wrong with you? Why can’t I delegate the pencil to you?’,” writes Andy Grove in High Output Management.

In the short term it may seem more convenient and less time consuming to do the task yourself. But the future costs are way too high:

• Tasks may seem small at first, but put together they add up and take a significant portion of your time. 
• When you try to hog all the critical knowledge, you end up becoming a bottleneck to the overall output of your team. 
• You stay up very late at night and get up early in the morning, yet feeling that there isn’t enough time to get everything done. Some important work is always falling through the cracks.  
• You are so busy tackling the right now that you miss what’s important in the future.
• Your team gets the message “I don’t trust you enough.”
• You fail to invest in building the right skills within your team.
• At some point, the overwhelming amount of responsibilities takes a toll on your personal well-being and leads to stress and burnout. 

Does this sound familiar? You know you need to delegate and yet struggle to get it right every single time. When the outcome does not meet your expectations or work doesn’t get completed on time, is it a problem with trusting others to do it right? Do you find yourself saying “I should have done it myself” “I was a fool to let go” “I knew it’s never going to work.”

All this frustration and annoyance is a result of not paying attention to the right strategies that make a delegation effective. So what can you do to scale yourself while also scaling for impact? 

You have to learn to delegate well. You have to build the skill that separates effective leaders from ineffective ones. You can’t do it all on your own. You have to let go of the control that stands in the way of your employees’ growth. You have to learn to invest in those around you. Giving up control can feel hard, but it’s also necessary for growth. 

As Stephen R. Covey writes in The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People “The ability to delegate to others is the main difference between the roles of manager and independent producer. A producer does whatever is necessary to accomplish desired results, to get the golden eggs. A parent who washes the dishes, an architect who draws up blueprints, or a secretary who types correspondence is a producer. But when a person sets up and works with and through people and systems to produce golden eggs, that person becomes a manager in the interdependent sense. A parent who delegates washing the dishes to a child is a manager. An architect who heads a team of other architects is a manager. A secretary who supervises other secretaries and office personnel is an office manager. A producer can invest one hour of effort and produce one unit of results, assuming no loss of efficiency. A manager, on the other hand, can invest one hour of effort and produce ten or fifty or a hundred units through effective delegation. Management is essentially moving the fulcrum over, and the key to effective management is delegation.”

5 Steps to Delegate Effectively 

1. Shift from doing to leading

Effective delegation requires letting go of control and it starts with a big mindset shift.

Surely you were promoted because you were faster and better than your peers, but those aren’t the same skills that will help you succeed in this position. As a lead, manager or a leader, the impact of your work isn’t based on what you achieve directly, it’s rooted in how you enable your team to work together and deliver on results. In other words, don’t stretch your own limits, stretch the limits of your team. Shift your mindset from doing to leading others. From generating an outcome yourself to helping others achieve the same outcome. From practicing the skills that got you here to investing in building the same skills in others so that they can do it too. 

“If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate,” writes John C. Maxwell in Developing the Leaders Around You.

One of the reasons why it’s so hard to let go of control is aiming for faultless execution. When you aren’t willing to accept failures as learning opportunities or when every mistake reflects on their competence, you fail to give space to others to learn and grow. You see them as personal inadequacies as opposed to it being a natural part of growth.  

Build fault tolerance in your mind and attitude. Be willing to accept failures, to experiment. If you get furious every time someone makes a mistake, people will soon learn to play safe. Creativity and innovation will take a back seat and you won’t achieve what you have been aiming all along.  

When you struggle to delegate, start with asking yourself these questions:

1. What am I struggling to let go off?
2. What is my worst fear – is it realistic or just a creation of my mind?
3. What are the upsides of delegating this work?
4. What would happen if I continue working this way? Burn out, prevent my team’s growth, limit what we can achieve together? Write them down to serve as a useful reminder.  
5. What does my role demand – perfectionism or teamwork?

Facing these fears upfront will shift your frame of mind from the inclination to do it yourself to considering the possibility of delegating it to others. That in itself is a very useful first step.  

Once the mindset shift has started, it’s time to start shifting behaviors and the best way to do that is to do it right from the beginning. 

2. Map right problems to right people 

Picking the right person is the crucial part of getting the job done well. It’s not always the person who can do it best. You need to ask yourself – who needs this opportunity right now? Who needs to practice these skills? Who might seem interested to take on this challenge? Who actually has the bandwidth?  

A crucial mistake most managers make at this stage is to delegate work which shouldn’t be done at all. Without careful planning, they hurry into getting things off their plate and end up delegating inconsequential work. Peter Drucker wrote, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Tim Ferris echoes the idea in The 4-Hour Workweek. He writes “Have you ever been given illogical assignments, handed unimportant work, or commanded to do something in the most inefficient fashion possible? Not fun and not productive. Now it’s your turn to show that you know better. Delegation is to be used as a further step in reduction, not as an excuse to create more movement and add to the unimportant. Unless something is well-defined and important, no one should do it. Eliminate before you delegate.” 

A useful practice to effectively delegate involves utilizing the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize all your goals into the 4 quadrants which enables you to focus on the important, work towards reducing the urgent, identify work that can be delegated and ruthlessly eliminate everything else. 

Passing responsibilities and giving opportunities to others is great, but not if it’s something that you got to do yourself. Laying out vision for the team, determining recruitment budgets, defining hiring plans, or conducting interviews as a hiring manager are examples of some of the important things that shouldn’t be delegated or delayed. 

Finding the right balance is tricky. You have to look at both the sides and ask questions:

• What can I and only I do? 
• Why am I the best person to solve this problem?
• Can I delegate the rest?
• Which tasks will help my team learn something new?
• What kind of opportunities will help them build a new skill?

Once you are able to identify the parts that only you can do, identify ways to delegate the rest. Map people to different areas based on their strengths, the opportunities they need or the skills they have been looking to practice.

With the right thing to delegate figured out, next comes the problem of delegating it right. 

3. Delegate problems, not solutions 

Managers fail to delegate effectively when they pass on the opportunity but refuse to give the autonomy that goes with it. They share the “what,” but hold on to the “how.” They want things done and want it done their way. It leaves their team members, especially the high performers frustrated. They say – what’s the point of delegating a task and then micromanaging every decision? 

To delegate effectively, focus on the results and not the methods. Show them the destination, but let them steer their own ship. Don’t let your ego or desire for perfectionism obstruct others from getting work done. Be ready to accept the fact that different people will take different approaches. Some tasks will not be so well done and others will be better than you had imagined. 

Spend your time and energy into providing clear, upfront understanding of the problem statement and ask for their commitment in driving it to completion. Let your team know that some failure is acceptable, but that doesn’t give them permission to be careless or lazy. Talk to them about what’s acceptable and what’s not. You can keep the bar high while leaving room for learning and growth. 

In Drive, Daniel Pink writes that people often want autonomy over the four T’s “their task, their time, their technique, and their team.” He adss “In an economy that demands nonroutine, creative, conceptual abilities—as any artist or designer would agree. Autonomy over task has long been critical to their ability to create. And good leaders (as opposed to competent “managers”) understand this in their bones.”

What can you do?

Think in terms of the final outcomes you desire and not the specific tasks someone needs to do to achieve it. When you define the outcome clearly, but empower others to implement their own solutions, they aren’t restricted to one way of doing things. Giving people a choice of method also makes them feel responsible for results. 

Share the “what” – the specific outcome that needs to be achieved, support it with “why” – how it fits into the big picture and define what success looks like – what looks like a job well done. Knowing the “Why” of doing something is both motivating and inspiring. It opens the door to creativity and innovation. It invites people to find new ways of doing things as opposed to sticking with how it has always been done. By letting go of “how,” you aren’t asking them to simply mark an item off their todo list, you are asking them to create their own todo list to accomplish the task.  

This advice from General George S. Patton sums up the idea well “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” 

4. Delegate, don’t abdicate

Empowerment does not mean boundary less freedom. You cannot be too hands off and expect people to figure everything out on their own. People need support to feel empowered. Leaving them to struggle and figure everything out on their own leads to frustration, adds to confusion and lack of support can make them feel helpless. 

They need your support along the way. Involved too much? You run the risk of micromanagement. Involved too little? It can make you miss those critical moments where your support or advice could have made a difference. The magic is in the balance. 

As Andy Groove writes in High Output Management. “Delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of a task. Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for its accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result. Monitoring is not meddling, but means checking to make sure an activity is proceeding in line with expectations.”

Set upfront expectations on the intermediate milestones. Align on frequency of updates. Discuss how and when you can touch base to keep things moving. Knowing you are there to help can act as a powerful force to keep them motivated on the task. 

When they face challenges or setbacks, help them find their own solutions by asking questions instead of spoon-feeding solutions. Coach, don’t solve is the mantra. Ask relevant questions to develop their critical thinking skills:

• What have you tried?
• What worked?
• What didn’t work?
• What obstacles stand in your way?
• What can you do to tackle them?
• What else can you do to make progress?
• Who else might be helpful in solving this problem?
• How can you ask for help?

5. Incorporate feedback loop

Every leader is blind to their own blind spots. Consider yourself a rockstar at delegation? Ask your team – they probably think you suck at it. 

The only way to know where you stand and what you can do to improve is to incorporate feedback from the process. Spend some review time with your team to understand how delegation worked for them:

• Did they understand the problem clearly?
• Were they empowered to solve it?
• Did they get the context and support required to solve it effectively? 
• What were they missing? What can be done better?
• What’s going well and how can it be improved?
• What should you absolutely stop doing?
• What should you start doing to make delegation more effective?
• What part of delegation doesn’t work and needs a new strategy to make it more effective? 

Doing this at frequent intervals with your team not only establishes their trust, it opens you to implement your own self-correction process so that you can finally let go of that control and enable your team to start doing more.  

Summary

1. If you are tasked with the responsibility to lead others, you need to learn to delegate effectively. It’s the only way to scale your impact and the output of your team.
2. Trying to do everything yourself prevents your team from building the essential skills to learn and grow, limits your teams’ collective outcome and can cause you to feel stress and burnout.
3. The first step to let go of control requires a mindset shift from doing to leading others.
4. Break down your goals and map them to different team members based on their skills or the opportunities they need. Be careful to avoid delegating work that shouldn’t be done at all or a task that only you need to fulfill.
5. Delegate the “what” of the problem, support it with “why,” and empower your team to work out the “how.” Stating the expected outcome without the method enables your team to achieve better results. 
6. Don’t abdicate your team. Support and coach them to make the right decisions and continue making forward progress.
7. No process can improve without incorporating the feedback loop. Work with your team to determine how you are doing and what you can do to be better.

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