Delegation: Skill Set or Mindset?

Is Delegation a Skill Set or a Mindset?

Is Miller Lite less filing or great tasting?  Is a Certs a breath mint or candy mint?  In all cases, the answer is “yes”.  When it comes to improving your ability to delegate, skills and attitudes are like love and marriage: “You can’t have one without the other” *.

Required Skills

There are several prerequisite skills needed to delegate:

• Communication of How, What and Why: Read More
• An understanding of the task at hand and it’s desired outcomes
• An understanding of the capabilities of the delegatee.
• The ability to train and develop your delegatees.

The Delegation Attitude Conundrum

As you seek to delegate, your strong competency and familiarity can be more of a curse than a blessing.  Why? It fosters this potentially paralyzing self limiting belief:

“No one can do this as well as I can.”

As long as you believe this is true. You’re right.  And, who doesn’t like being right? Right?  And as long as you foster this belief, you’re more inclined to simply do it yourself.

Here’s another delegation squashing belief:

If I have someone else do it, it will take longer.

Here again. You’re probably right.  And as long as cling to this belief and avoid investing time to train and develop others, you will continue to be right.  But at what cost?

If someone else does it, they will mess it up.

You’re right again.  This is just the kind of mindset that creates a culture where failure is feared so much that innovation is routinely suppressed.  To help change this mindset, I recommend my previous post on Fear of Failure.

Don’t you ever get tired of being so right so often?

I believe that the need to be right is the cause of two afflictions: delegation reluctance and the more severe delegation phobia.  Either of these is proven to be hazardous to both your health and your wealth. So I ask…

• When is it time to stop being imprisoned by your rightness?
• How much has you’re do-it-yourself attitude prevented you from achieving bigger and better things?
• How much are you wasting the potential resources of those around you by hoarding responsibilities?
• Are you on your way to living in Hamsterville?  It’s that place where your time is spent running on a hamster wheel while personal progress suffers when you can’t escape the routine.

A Benchmark Example

We’re all familiar with the responsibilities of a school principal. So here’s some food for thought.

The Principal doesn’t drive the school bus.

How would the parents and teachers perceive a principal who did so?  So as you approach your To-Do list, ask yourself:

• Am I about to get behind the wheel of the bus?
• Isn’t it my responsibility to find the bus driver?

Related Articles

• Fear of Failure is NOT an Option
• Delegation and the Power of Why.
• A Maestro’s Breakthrough Discovery
• Beyond the E-Myth

* Love and Marriage is a really old Sinatra song that served as the TV theme song for Married With Children.  Link to YouTube video.