During his tenure in management, every manager has to understand that delegation of responsibilities plays extremely important role in everyday business. Because a lot of managers arise from other professionals, delegation is one of problems they do not address well often. From my experience, the top indicator that there is some problem is if manager is “tired”. Generally, that tiredness is created not by managerial duties, but by a feeling that “I can do something better than my team” and then you have manager becoming a resource.

Manager has to trust his people. When you hire professionals you have to pick people that are professionally trustable and accountable. More senior position is, more you have to be able to trust them. When you delegate some responsibility, you will create a feeling of ownership which creates much better performance and leaves you more time for other managerial duties. If you have to check everything and approve everything it shows:

  1. you are not able to hire people properly,
  2. you are not well organizing your team, and in the end:
  3. you are reducing productivity and output of the team you manage.

“If I delegate everything, what should I do?”. This is very often remark that shows other problems. As I already wrote: you have to manage resources, not to be one. When manager is not properly delegating execution of some tasks to his team, he sacrifices some items that should be in the top of his list and that are: creation of strategy, creation of vision, evaluation of previous performance and creating an environment “to make it better next time”. If you have team members coming to you asking how to do something or/and what to choose for every detail, you can know that you broke the system. Team should be able to function without you making decisions for every detail. You will find companies with a lot of senior professionals without any trust to make any decision. That means that: 1. you are overpaying your people or more common: 2. you are not delegating responsibilities enough.

It is never too often to repeat that the top position in the list of duties for every manager is “increase of productivity”. Anything you do has to be oriented towards that and all optimizations of the procedure, changes, hiring and selection of technology has to be in the direction of increasing, communicating and maintaining of productivity:

  1. education of team members - creates people that are solving problems quicker and with more quality
  2. motivation of team members - increases their performance and ideas
  3. promotion of diversity of opinions - creates a much wider “knowledge bag” that will offer more diverse solutions to problems and requirement
  4. creation of feeling that everyone has an important position and role in the team - increases performance
  5. creation of feeling of responsibility - team members will start to fight for tasks they are assigned to, not to be passive and inert

Conclusion. I know it is hard, but you have to see that top managers in the market spend a lot of time in creation of positive thinking, innovative culture and most important: they have people they can trust. Managers generally have really untied hands to do a lot of conventional and unconventional things for the benefit of the company so do not waste that trust from the owner and use that to create a difference.

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