The essence: effective delegation

Apr 25, 2022

Delegating is a leadership skill that benefits you and your team. But deciding when and how to delegate which tasks to whom can be overwhelming. And the discomfort many of us feel when assigning responsibilities to others or making requests to our colleagues can lead us to mistakenly believe it’s easier to just keep doing everything ourselves.

To learn to delegate in a way that delivers the results you hope for, we hire an aerospace engineer who wants to overcome the tricky, difficult aspects of delegation so she can do more strategic work. She and Amy G talk to a leadership coach who shares practices that help get the job done and make you and the person you delegate to feel good about the experience.

Guests:

Deborah Grayson Riegel is a communication and presentation skills coach. She is the co-author of Overcoming Overthinking and Go To Help.

Jasmine LeFlore is an aerospace engineer at Raytheon Technologies and runs Greater Than Tech, a nonprofit that teaches girls about engineering and business.

Sources:

• “8 Ways Leaders Delegate Successfully,” by Deborah Grayson Riegel

• “Managers: Compassion and Responsibility Are Not Mutual”, by Amy Gallo

• “How to Decide Which Tasks to Delegate”, by Jenny Blake

• “You are delegating. It does not work. This is why.” by Sabina Nawaz

• “How do you know if you’re delegating too much – and what to do about it”, by Anne Sugar

• “How to Stop Delegating and Start Teaching”, by Art Markman

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Email us: womenatwork@hbr.org

A full transcript of this episode will be available on May 2.

This post The essence: effective delegation

was original published at “https://hbr.org/podcast/2022/04/the-essentials-delegating-effectively”