Effective delegation is what distinguishes stressed, overburdened, and uninspiring leaders. from those who love their jobs and motivate their teams to achieve great success.
As a leader, there are always far more requests demanding your attention than you have time to do. If you feel like you’re the only one who can tackle your workload, inevitably, some things will slip through the cracks.
However, if you delegate tasks that don’t require your expertise and/or authority, you can focus on your most critical initiatives while ensuring that all of your miscellaneous projects and tasks are completed. This creates five powerful benefits of effective delegation.
Here are 5 benefits of delegation you'll experience:
1) Grow Your Business Faster and More Reliably
Gallup found that leaders who are effective delegators achieved 112% higher growth rates than those who don’t delegate at all or who delegate poorly. Effective delegation provides such a huge advantage because it:
- Enables leaders to focus on the strategic activities that drive business growth
- Increases employee engagement by empowering junior employees to play a role in supporting key company initiatives
- Encourages employees to engage in continuous learning, which boosts their morale and effectiveness
Together, the benefits of effective delegation create a company culture that motivates everyone to contribute their best work.
Don’t know how to delegate effectively or what types of tasks you should offload? Read our free guide How to Use Delegation to Become a More Impactful Leader.
2) Focus on the Activities that Matter Most
A survey of 500 managers revealed that 36% spend an average of 3 to 4 hours daily on administrative and routine tasks, such as scheduling meetings and travel, preparing reports, filing expenses, managing their inbox, coordinating with key parties, and handling other repetitive chores. Additionally, 23% of managers dedicate more than five hours each day to these activities.
This is a huge loss of productivity since that time spent on urgent but unimportant tasks pulls you away from the strategic activities that drive your success.
Effective delegation enables you to maximize your success by allowing you to focus on strategic activities that require your expertise and authority, rather than wasting time on admin tasks and low-value projects.
Even if you only delegate half of your admin work and lower-level projects, you’ll still save an hour and a half to two hours per day, which can translate into significant productivity gains.
Worried that your employees are too busy for you to delegate tedious tasks to them? Consider hiring a virtual assistant. They can reliably tackle all of your sudden and ongoing admin-related tasks so that you never have to worry about doing them.
Read our guide to learn how a virtual assistant can help you.
3) Create Learning Opportunities that Improve Retention
Sitel Group’s Future of Work and Employee Learning Report found that 37% of employees would quit their jobs if they were not given opportunities to learn new skills. Delegating new tasks is an easy and effective way to retain your growth-driven employees, as it gives them the experience they’re looking for and requires minimal effort on your part.
Most managers avoid delegating higher-level tasks to employees because they’re afraid the individual will do it wrong and they’ll have to spend more time fixing the mistakes than they would if they completed the task themselves.
Providing clear guidelines and delegating to dedicated employees increases the likelihood of success. The same report shows that 83% of employees prefer hands-on learning and are willing to teach themselves new skills for new projects.
Whenever you require additional time to concentrate on an important project, delegate some minor tasks to junior employees who are eager to develop new skills and demonstrate their worth to the company.
4) Assess Your Team’s Promotion Potential
Choosing who to promote can be extremely challenging because being successful in one position isn’t a reliable indicator of success in another.
Delegation can help solve this issue by giving you the opportunity to test multiple employees’ skills before entering the selection process. The key is to have all senior team members delegate small projects to junior team members on an ongoing basis.
Doing this ensures that as soon as one of your senior employees leaves, they can make an objective recommendation for who is the best fit to replace them. It can also minimize some of the politics surrounding promotions.
Be aware that your senior employees may not know how to delegate effectively. Before you instruct them to start delegating to junior employees, coach them on the following:
- What kinds of projects are appropriate to delegate
- How to give clear guidelines for projects
- Who they should delegate to
- How often do they delegate to each junior person (make sure they delegate equally to everyone)
The initial coaching effort will be worthwhile because it provides a plan for when senior employees leave and boosts their productivity by reducing time spent on lower-value tasks.
5) Improve Your Relationships with Employees
Delegation is often seen merely as a method for leaders to lessen their workload. However, it also serves as a valuable tool for leaders to strengthen their relationships with employees. Employees seek validation that their managers respect them, and by entrusting them with important tasks and information, leaders can effectively demonstrate this respect.
Not only does the validation from delegated tasks improve morale, but it also makes them more receptive to their managers.
Research shows that when managers regularly delegate tasks, employees are more likely to seek feedback and act on the advice they receive. This behavior is driven by employees’ desire to meet their managers’ expectations so that they are continuously trusted to handle important work.
Enjoy The Benefits of Delegation By Becoming an Effective Delegator
Read our free guide How to Use Delegation to Be a More Impactful Leader to learn:
- What kinds of tasks should you delegate
- Who you should delegate to
- How to set up the people you delegate to for success