In fact, the more urgent a project is, the more carefully planned the delegated authority must be. Too often, a sense of urgency causes leaders to skip this important preparation. It should begin with a clear conversation between the leader and the employee clarifying expectations, honestly assessing what the employee is ready to take on, and explaining how the leader will remain involved. The amount of authority the delegator relinquishes should match the delegatee’s skill and readiness with the situation at hand. In most circumstances that is not delegation: It’s abandonment. And with unfettered optimism, they then declare “I trust you” and let employees muddle through on their own, with limited perspective and experience. But eventually, being the bottleneck becomes too stressful, and in demanding situations leaders are forced to give people chances to step up to new challenges. A more insidious fear is that a follower’s success will make them irrelevant! So they cling to their authority with exhausting levels of control. Leaders obsess over letting go of their own authority because an untested follower’s failure will make them look bad. Many leaders struggle to let go of decision rights. This is Daniela’s problem, and it’s a common one. Let’s examine how this might work in four common but stressful situations.ĭelegating important work. They must learn to increase their “range of motion” across an array of leadership challenges and increased pressures - because that gives them a more effective set of options from which to choose. Just as an orthopedist works with joint injuries whose stiffened muscles need to increase their range of motion, leaders must avoid the whiplashing effect of bounding between polarities. Unfortunately, the attempt to impose certainty on the uncertain tends to oversimplify things to a black-and-white, all-or-nothing extreme. Faced with less familiar conditions for which our tried-and-true approaches won’t work, we reflexively counter our natural anxiety by narrowing and simplifying our options. ![]() In tough moments, we reach for premature conclusions rather than opening ourselves to more and better options. This can mean that stressed-out leaders like Daniela resort to binary choice-making, limiting the options available to them. But every time they drop a ball I hand off, it takes me twice as long to clean up the mess as it would have taken for me to just do it myself.” Exhausted from failing at one extreme, her natural impulse was to revert back to the other.Īs research on decision making shows, our brains are wired to be more reactionary under stress. ![]() Exasperated, she vented to me, “I thought delegating was supposed to free me up to do more of my own job. To her dismay, many were struggling to take on the levels of freedom she’d offered - even though they’d asked for more responsibility. She’d been working on delegating more to her team. A senior sales executive I’ll call Daniela was frustrated.
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