Delegating - The Art of Letting Go

One of the traps that new leaders fall into is in trying to keep doing the things that they used to do before they were promoted. Unfortunately, this tends to lead to either a complete lack of management, or just as bad, micro-management.

It's very easy to want to keep doing what we were good at in our last job, especially if we have just been promoted. One of the very reasons that we have been promoted is because we were good at doing something - so naturally it's hard to stop doing what got us noticed.

There is a fundamental mind-shift that we all need to make when we are made the leader, or rise up to a new level of leadership. We need to accept that we are now required to do new things, and stop doing the same work as the people that we are now supervising. Our job is to plan, coordinate and control tempo and quality. This is what delegation entails.

On our Leadership 101 Workshop we introduce you to a simple tool that helps you make this transition. This tool makes it transparent to all team members (including yourself) who does what, and perhaps more importantly, it makes it very obvious how the team needs to communicate and interact with each other, as well as with others outside of the team, in order to get the job done. This makes it very easy for you as the team leader to keep track of key responsibilities, and so conversations around performance are made easy.

This tool is also a great way to induct new team members into understanding their role and the expectations placed on them. As obvious as this requirement is, most people report that they feel that they have had poor inductions into their jobs, and ambiguity around the expectations of their efforts.

Do you want to know more? Join us on a Leadership 101 Workshop.