How to overcome the fear of Delegation?

Most of us, especially managers, can be seen complaining about too much work and too little time to accomplish anything. Our days are governed by meetings which seem useless, phone calls which are random and distracting, business lunches, visits, events which take too much time and energy; leaving us tired with no time to work on things which really matter to us and to our business and personal growth.

We know we need help, we know we need to delegate some of our responsibilities to someone else, but most of the time we either fail to ask for help or delegate our work to other people. Sometimes our past experiences with delegation did not deliver expected results create a bias in our mind which is hard to overcome. Other times, we feel people are too difficult to deal with and we conclude it is better to manage things on our own.

Behind this decision of not delegating tasks, there is also a hidden fear which lingers in our subconscious mind which can be one or many of the following

1. My subordinates may think I am being too bossy and they may not like me.
2. I have to deal with that specific person which I want to avoid.
3. It is faster if I do it myself because the time it takes to delegate this to someone else might actually slow me down.
4. I have less trust in someone else because I can do this better than anybody else and if this task is not done properly, I’ll look bad.
5. I do not want to lose control.
6. What else I’ll do if this task is delegated? It is my job.
7. If someone else learns to do my job, I might have many competitors in the workplace and lose the status I enjoy.
8. What will my boss think about me if he sees I am not working hard enough?
9. Last time my efforts to delegate failed miserably. I had to do that task myself again and I wasted too much time with the person to whom I delegated. Therefore I do not want to delegate again.
10. What would they think about me If I asked for help?
11. My teammates are not motivated enough or interested in doing more tasks. It seems like I am the only one who cares about getting something done.
12. No one in my team has required skills and they will never be able to do this task.
13. Maybe if I entertain all the requests from my subordinates and help them with everything they will listen to me more and will offer help in return also.
14. I am good at this and I do not like doing something else which might be boring.
15. I am a perfectionist and other people might not do the task as good as I can do.

We might have one or more such fears for not delegating but in the long run these fears manifest themselves in bitter ways and cost us opportunities, scale, mental and physical health. Although the real cost of our failure to delegate is incalculable, if we could envision the damage it does and grasp the scale of it, maybe we could overcome our fears of delegation.

Disproportionate distribution of work

One of the most common effect of not being able to delegate work effectively is disproportionate distribution of work among team members where some people are overloaded with work to such an extent that you might push them or yourself to burnout while other enjoy relatively easy workload. Here are some other signs to identify if there is a need to delegate work

1. Why do you have so much work to do in the office while your colleagues are sitting idle with a little work at hand?
2. Why are you not able to go on vacations while some of your teammates do parties almost every weekend?
3. Why are you handed over more work once you finish a hard assignment and the stream of work never seems to end?
4. Why do you feel like non one else cares about the work but you?
5. How many other colleagues do you know who are in the same kind of situation like this?

Almost in every team or project, there are few people who do the majority of work while the rest of resources just tag along. These super productive people are self motivated, smart, disciplined and they contribute heavily in the total outcome. Everyone loves them, including their supervisors, managers and boss. The average skilled teammate is left to fend for himself.

This creates a disproportionate distribution of work among team members and sometimes to make the situation worse, these highly productive people are paid the same as other people whose contributions are very less comparatively. Slowly these people start to get demotivated, burned out, the work piles up for them and they start to leave and the team is left with less than average people who generally can not pick up the slack and everything starts to fail. This is a lose-lose situation for both hard working subordinates and teams in general.

Therefore it becomes imperative for a team leader to implement a framework to properly distribute workload and most of the time it starts with delegating some tasks to less productive people while freeing up time for our star teammates. On the other hand, if you are one of those highly productive people, you also share a responsibility to identify this pitfall and devise an effective delegation strategy along with your supervisor or manager.

You will burnout from workload

If you think that after you finish your current work, you will have some free time later on, or you will have less work to do; you are mistaken. If you are among top performers in your organisation, your work is not going to get reduced. Infact, on the contrary, your responsibilities and expectations from you will increase.

The reason behind this is very simple; since you are reliable, trustworthy and disciplined, everyone will come to you. Your boss would like to hand over the next assignment to you because chances of success with you are highest. Your manager will expect you to pick up more tasks while ignoring your colleagues who have less than average performance. This is not a bad things but an opportunity for you. Either you can learn the art of delegation to successfully manage the increased responsibility and hence rise in your career or you can try to manage everything yourself, the way you have been doing in the past, which will certainly end in you burning out from workload and you losing some good opportunities in your career.

It may cost you a promotion

After a point, all the promotions and roles generally require people management skills. The higher up you go, the responsibilities are bigger and the team you need to manage will be larger. Therefore, delegation skills are very important for your career growth. Also, imagine you are managing something (a task or small team) but you do not have delegation skills and therefore no one in your team is trained to pick up the work from you and suddenly an opportunity opens up where you could be promoted to a higher role. Do you think you will get that promotion? Answer is NO. Think from your boss’s point of view, he might want to promote you but then if you get promoted, there is no one to handle your work and that part of business will start to suffer. Your boss would like to keep you where you are and prefer to hire someone from outside for that new role. And thus, your lack of delegation skills have cost you a promotion you always wanted.

Your team will never grow

Delegation is one of the best ways to identify the next set of leaders from your team. It helps you measure capabilities, motivations and performance of your team members. Delegation is also one of the best ways to train and coach your current team members and build capabilities and skill sets within your team itself and thereby reducing the need for hiring people continuously. This creates a win-win situation for all parties involved where your team members feel motivated because they are learning new things and gives them a sense of growth, while for you, it frees up your time so that you can focus on better things. On the other hand, if you are poor at delegation, your team will never be ready for higher roles and responsibilities. They will never have the experience required to manage tasks successfully. Not only have you stopped their growth with your poor delegation skills, they will soon start to feel demotivated and feel stuck at one place and soon they will move on to the next opportunity with another employer where they perceive better chances of growth .

You will never learn people management skills

Delegation is more than handing over some tasks to your subordinates. It involves mostly working with people. You should be able to convey your ideas properly to people for them to work on it. You need to anticipate problems and suggest solutions to your subordinates. You need to learn to train them and coach them. You need to do performance reviews of your subordinates when most of them are your friends, sometimes getting into difficult conversations when their performance is poor. You need to keep your team motivated. You need to deal with people who are difficult to manage. You need to develop listening skills. You develop these skills from experience. The earlier you start, the more time you will have to master them and without it, your people management skills will be poor at best.

Once we start looking at delegation in this way, where we are recognising the cost of failure to delegate, we might be able to overcome fear of delegation. Successful delegation has tremendous benefits while failure is too expensive to bear the cost.