Delegation: From Fisher to Teacher
Delegation.
It's vital to continued progression as a leader. It's crucial to avoid burning out. It's required to ensure your team's growth.
So why is it so hard?
Because before becoming leaders, we were first individual contributors.
So we got good - real good - at DOING the task.
We were likely excellent at proactively figuring things out. At learning to Google and teach ourselves how to get things done.
Delegating was likely not a thing we did much of. We were the one being delegated to - correction - we were probably actively seeking out chances to take things off our boss/team members' plates before they even delegated it out.
So it can be a difficult adjustment to go from being the one that got delegated to, to being the delegator.
The biggest blocker to delegating is often our own mindset.
We have convinced ourselves that it's easier to just do the task than to teach it to another.
So we need to remind ourselves of the short-term nature of that perspective.
It's the old "Teach a person to fish" dilemma -
DO that task for them, the task gets done (but you get stuck continually fishing).
TEACH them to do the task, the task takes longer to get done at first (but you empower someone to fish and remove fishing from your own to-do list).
So when you notice yourself hesitate to hand something off, ask yourself -
Is this an opportunity to TEACH?
What's the short-term impact of my decision? The long-term impact?
And for help on knowing when it's time to delegate - and exactly HOW to set yourself up successfully for this - join me in 1:1 leadership development coaching.
