Effective delegation. Or: How do I make myself leader " as leader ?

In the "Leading Simple" in-house seminars, I am often asked how leader can free up leader time for essential management tasks. My simple answer: delegate. This unsettles the participants. Their reaction: "That doesn't work."The excuses are manifold:

• That kind of thing is not acceptable in our corporate culture.
• My employees need me (dependency myth) – without me, absolutely nothing gets done here.
• I do a lot of things myself, as I need to be visible to my colleagues and position myself well.
• I need to be involved in everything and know about all processes, procedures, and structures.

Nowadays, senior management no longer lacks money, knowledge, experience, or important networks. In my opinion, the scarcest commodity for leader time, a factor that will become even more important and valuable in the future.

I really like the image of the plate spinner, which you can see in almost every circus, as a fitting metaphor. A leader responsibility for many different plates responsibility employees, projects, meetings, customers... They have to make sure that these "plates" keep spinning without any of them falling to the ground.

My fellow trainers and I repeatedly find that most leader to keep too many plates spinning at once. When one or two of those plates fall, the disappointment and the mess are huge. This has something to do with prioritizing tasks according to urgency rather than importance, but also with a lack of knowledge about how to delegate properly.

Our academy practice shows that very few organizations have a standardized procedure for delegation discussions. The discussion can be described very well as passing the baton in a race. If everything is not planned and practiced, the baton will fall to the ground.

Six steps describe the standard procedure for a delegation meeting, which can of course be adapted individually depending on leader employee. In the run-up to the meeting, it is important that the leader considers which tasks they want to delegate to which employees (and whether the employee is actually up to the challenge).

The six steps of a delegation discussion:

1. What needs to be done? -> Describe the result precisely
2. Why is it important? -> Giving meaning
3. Ask questions -> How does the employee intend to accomplish the task? What is their first step?
4. Reflect -> Did the employee understand the task? What specifically needs to be done?
5. responsibility and define necessary authority, power, resources, and responsibility
6. Set a check date and then check it

Let's stick with the example of the plate spinner: The most effective leader very few, but crucial plates spinning at the same time and think very carefully about whether they should and can responsibility new responsibility . This clarity is also reflected in the handover of tasks. For each new plate, they delegate another to a capable employee. True to the motto: How can I increase my impact per unit of time, rather than how can I pack even more into my everyday life?

Delegating has a lot to do with letting go. This is not the core competence of most leader, but it can be learned. The attitude "I'd rather do everything myself"is an admission of failure in your ability to develop other people. Your ongoing goal as leader therefore be: How can I make myself "superfluous" while the results under my responsibility and better? Therefore, always ask yourself the following questions:

• What can I delegate?
• What else can someone else do?
• What was the last thing I made myself today?

One more relatively logical calculation to conclude:

Doing it yourself means:

A lot of input = a lot of output

Delegating means:

Little input = lots of output

You can immediately use this "saved" effort to devote yourself to important management tasks: such as results-oriented task descriptions (ROTD), management guidelines, developmental questions... The task of delegating is therefore the most effective way to develop both yourself and other people.