How to chose the right person to delegate the work to?

Deciding whom to delegate the task to is one of the most important decisions we have to make in order for delegation to be successful. We might do everything else in a proper, disciplined manner but the choice of person can make or break the whole thing. Time availability, Interest in tasks, Capability and reliability, Closeness to problem of issue, Potential to benefit from assignment; are some of the factors affecting choice of right person. Let’s look at them in detail.

Urgency and nature of task

This is one of the most important factors affecting our choice for delegation. If a task is super urgent, it straight aways removes the possibility that we can spend some time training other people to do the job, therefore we can only choose those people who are well equipped to handle our requirements. If the task is important and failure to deliver it will have consequences, we might not hand over this task to some inexperienced team member and therefore we have to select someone who has past experiences in delivering similar work successfully. If the task involves sharing confidential information or business secrets, we might want to select only those people with whom we have built trust over a period of time rather than giving it to some new member in the team. Therefore the nature of the task itself limits the choices of people we can deploy to deliver the task.

Time Availability

The next thing we need to do is check whether the person we are considering for delegation has time to pick up another assignment or responsibility. We do not want to give too much work to our favourite team members and push them towards burnout. We also want to take care of the situation where there should be proper distribution of work among team members and few selective people should not be overburdened with unmanageable workload while the rest are running out of tasks to do.

Sometimes, the only person in our team who can do the job is busy with different assignments and we have no other option but to go to that person while being fully aware that he already has too much on his plate. In such cases, we need to help that person prioritise his work items and if possible we can help him to delegate some of his not so important items to other colleagues and make time for our assignment. Additionally, in every workplace there are people who do not say “No” to anything, be aware of such kinds of personalities. They will take the task but will not be able to deliver because they have bitten more than they could chew and delegation will fail for obvious reasons.

Interest In Tasks

People generally grow with time and a task which was once exciting for them is no longer interesting now. A person might have done similar tasks a lot of times in the past and giving them the same thing again might be boring and repetitive from their point of view, meanwhile there might be a different person who is junior and who might find the same task interesting and will consider it an opportunity to learn new things. Therefore while choosing a person to delegate a task to, always look for a person who is interested in picking up the task at hand. The person who is self motivated, shows interest and considers it as an opportunity to grow, is more likely to deliver the task than someone who has neither the interest nor the motivation to deliver.

Capabilities and Reliability

Different people have different skill sets and capabilities when it comes to delivering a task. They might have a different level of motivation also for the same assignment. Additionally, you might feel one person is more reliable than the other given the past working experiences you had with them. Therefore both these factors should be considered when delegating. Sometimes the person who is more capable is not reliable, while the person who is reliable might not be the best choice depending on his capabilities.

When you are delegating with an intention to train your subordinates, pick those who are more reliable. They might not have capabilities now but those can be built slowly. No one knows everything in the beginning. Reliability is one of the fundamental qualities of good leaders therefore choose people with integrity and reliability; capabilities will follow.

Closeness to the issue

​​Context matters. When choosing people for delegation, pick those who are close to the issue, task or problem because they already know the context and it will be easy to bring them up to speed with the task at hand. It will require less time to make them understand issues, solutions and steps needed to execute the task. Even if there is a better skilled person available, he or she might need considerable efforts upfront to understand the problem, history and why a particular solution was suggested. You will also end up investing more time with them as compared to people who know the context already.

Potential to benefit from Assignment

Sometimes we do not have a person with the right skill set to execute a task but we still choose to delegate because we might want to train our people and to give them sufficient experience so that they are ready for taking ownership of that task in future. Here we are trying to develop future leaders and in this case we might have multiple candidates to choose from. When this situation arises that we have to select one suitable candidate among many, think about who will benefit the most from this assignment. Maybe we want to give this assignment to our favourite subordinate because the assignment is important and will help him grow or maybe the assignment is not difficult enough and we can give it to a subordinate who is struggling and successful delivery of the task will help to build his confidence.

When you do not have anyone to delegate to

Generally people are seen complaining that they do not have anyone in the team to whom they can delegate the work. Even when they are managing a group of people, they think none of them is fit to take a task from them and they believe they need to hire someone else from outside. This situation arrives when a task is complex, has many steps in it or it requires years of experience. For example running a department, a project or even hiring. Often, when you start searching for a person from outside to whom such tasks can be delegated, it takes time, longer than expected. The better thing to do in this situation is not to try delegating a full task to one person but rather check if the task can be divided into smaller tasks (or steps) and if those smaller tasks can be handled by current team members. If you can not delegate 100% of a task, can you delegate 10% of it? If yes, can you then raise the bar and delegate 20% of it. If not, can you train your current team members to take that 20% responsibility?

Simple checklist to find the best person to delegate

Here is a simple checklist to see which candidate is the best for a given task to be delegated. This checklist can be run for multiple people and we can choose the final candidate based on their score.

Candidate	Checklist	Answer
Candidate A	Does the candidate has time availability?	Yes/No
	Is the candidate interested in doing this task?	Yes/No
	Does the candidate has required capabilities and is reliable?	Yes/No
	Does the task has urgency and other time/deadline constraints?	Yes/No
	Does the candidate know the context of the task?	Yes/No
	Will the candidate benefit from this assignment?	Yes/No

Although this is not an exhaustive checklist to select best people for a particular task but should give a base point to start working on. We can always built upon this list and tweak it to suit our own unique requirements. Once we have finalised our own checklist, we can compare various available candidates for better suitability for a given task.

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