It is already one year since I was promoted to a managerial role. Every company has some form of expectations on their managerial staffs within the company. Being a newly promoted manager, I was certainly lost on what my company expects from me. I asked myself questions such as “Do I need to do even more to proof my worth?” and “How can I differentiate myself as a manager from others?”. I believe these are common questions you may have asked yourself if you are like me who is new in a managerial position.
My answer to that is “Leadership”. Over the past one year, I was focusing on improving my leadership. I believe that leadership is one of the important key skill that is required from managers. My personal definition of leadership is how you manage the staff that reports to you as a manager and it is my duty to guide and train them so that they can be effective and generate positive outcomes for the company.
Frustrated with work and have no time to read up and invest in stocks? Within “Leadership”, one of the key skills I learnt recently is “Delegation”. Delegation is not simply assigning tasks to the staff reporting to you. Allocation is giving a piece of work to your staff that they have to do as part of their job. Delegation is taking some of your work to give to your team members for the purpose of improving their skills etc.
As managers, why do we need to delegate? As stated above, one reason is to give the staff more exposure so that they can improve their skills through experience. Another reason can be to free up your time so that you can focus on more important tasks that your management gave you. Of course, delegation is not that easy such as dumping the responsibility to them and you wash your hands off the task. When you delegate a task, the accountability and responsibility still lies on you, the manager.
Here are 5 quick steps on how to delegate
- Pick a staff that you think his skill can match the task that you wish to delegate to.
- Explain the background and provide as much details as possible on the task that you wish to delegate to him.
- Both yourself and the staff must be committed to the task that you plan to delegate.
- As a manager, remember that you are suppose to provide support to the staff when he needs help on the work that you delegate to him. Monitor the progress.
- After the delegated task is completed, give recognition and feed backs to the staff. Do have a session with the staff to run through what has gone well and what can be improved.
If you are a new manager like me, I hope the above helps!