How do you delegate tasks to your team – Expert Advice Series

Our guest Expert Georgina Bale – CEO, Bower Group is here to share her expertise answering the following questions:

What’s your approach to the delegation with employees? How do you ensure that tasks are carried out to completion?

My approach to delegating tasks to my employees as well as ensuring that tasks are carried out to completion is entirely rooted in two things: autonomy and empowerment.

I’m far from the first to know that autonomy leads to fulfilment, which leads to better performance. Giving employees ownership or full-time responsibility of their work creates a meaningful impact in multiple ways: it helps them to feel more engaged in their work and more trusted by their employer, makes them more motivated, and inspires them to pursue further responsibility — a win-win for your employee’s experience level as well as project fulfilment. Overall, ownership leads to more efficient task completion compared to dragging employees through arbitrary deadlines.

Alongside this, making sure that an employee understands how their role and the tasks they’re assigned fit into the greater mission of the business is key to helping them find the purpose of their work and understand the broader value they bring by completing their Tasks.

When I delegate tasks, I make sure to do so while communicating to an employee that their ownership of a task is always paired with training in whatever capacity they need. This is my way of ensuring that there is a consistent support system in place to keep employees motivated. By empowering them in this way, I aim to inspire employees to feel personally responsible for completing tasks while also turning delegation into a method of supported Training.

Importantly, I also recognize when support isn’t needed and an employee’s previous experience makes them more of an expert than their team members or myself in regard to a particular skill or project. This is an easy tip on paper, but can sometimes become muddled if you as a supervisor or founder get too immersed in your own idealized visions.

Honouring the expertise of your employees is a fast track to better relationships and more efficient task completion. In tandem with this, I also plan ahead from the recruitment phase to make sure that one person isn’t so invaluable to the business that their work can’t be completed efficiently by another employee in the event of any obstacles. This isn’t meant to be a threat, but rather a method of fostering an environment in which an employee feels comfortable saying when their workload is too high. They can rest assured that there are always avenues to ask for help, share advice and request a review. Creating a feeling of shared motivation between employees also keeps up the momentum and lets them know that they are not completely alone in making their deadlines.

Finally, I have to emphasize my enthusiasm for the core of my own productivity, and therefore the message that naturally spreads to my employees: using tech to boost your performance. There are so many amazing tools out there, and so many to choose from when looking to enhance your work — tracking your responsibilities or priorities, checking your progress, visualising your workload and more — all of which naturally lead to a more efficient workflow.

With all this said, it’s important to remember that no strategy is one-size-fits-all. Regularly touching base with employees and observing what works and what doesn’t is key to making real progress and, importantly, improving myself as an employer— I am far from perfect,  make plenty of mistakes and always have room to grow.