The Blogkitten QOTD

Dec 18, 2008 at 7:11 AM
4 comments

Since I'm overloaded at work due to one of my 4-person department being out on maternity leave, I've discovered the joy (or pain?) of delegation.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: If you delegate something to someone, do you think you should have to recheck the work or should you be able to have confidence in the fact that they can't screw up even the easiest task?

I thought that I should be able to hand it off and forget about it because the things I hand off are the simple tasks: sorting, making changes to a document, basic data entry, etc.

One of the two people I'm delegating to is pretty good and does great work with little direction and the other can't do the simplest task without coming back to me to tell me that I should make sure they did it right. It's just changing words - how difficult can that be?

It's frustrating to say the least.

So, how do you handle delegation?

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It all depends on who you delegate to. How much do you trust their competence? Also, if they screw up, how bad will you look?

It's definitely best if you can trust people whom you delegate to. However I often over-communicate as well (lots of FYI emails).

it all depends on their competence. and if their work reflects you. the last i want is for their lack of caring to dig you a deeper hole of work.

One should be able to delegate, but I'd certainly review the work the first few times. If it doesn't pan out then follow up with detailed procedural guidelines, explaining not only the how but also the why. Sometimes the latter helps to nudge people into doing it the right way. (In other words I've often been glad that I checked the work because not everyone things about all the details.)

The Blogkitten QOTD

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