Why tasks don’t stay delegated

Have you ever wondered why tasks don’t stay delegated?  Sometimes it seems that even the simplest of tasks need so much hands-on supervision we can’t help thinking “It would have been easier to do it myself!”

This is even truer in an environment such as a not-for-profit or church in which most of our “workers” are volunteers with a heart of gold who want to serve the Lord, giving of themselves sacrificially, and whom we feel we cannot performance-manage in the same way we would in a professional workplace.

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to give into the temptation to do the job ourselves.  We do that and we cease to be a leader / manager. 

Some years ago, I had a conversation with a corps officer who was going through this frustration.  He had a corps treasurer who was a lovely saintly soul; honest and reliable, caring and compassionate, but lacking in attention to detail.  The result was a high level of errors, reports not completed on time, and a considerable amount of checking and fixing that the CO had to do. 

The CO was so frustrated that he said he was thinking about taking the role off the treasurer and doing the task himself.   During the course of our conversation, I asked him if there was another person who could take on the role.  There was not.  I asked him how much time he actually spent on checking up on the treasurer.  He said about one to two hours a week.  I asked him how much time it would take if he took over the treasurer’s role.  He said about four or five hours.  So, we concluded, even under these adverse conditions he has saved himself between two and four hours every week by delegating.

In most cases like this, a proper assessment of the situation will confirm that, even if you have to do a lot of massaging, a delegated task is best left delegated. 

I went on to ask the officer what he was doing to skill up the treasurer.  He expressed the thought (herein somewhat sanitised) that the treasurer was working to his capacity and that he was not going to improve no matter what. 

“Does he know that you check and fix his work?  I asked.  “We have never discussed it, but he must know, because the figures are changed”, he replied.  We talked about how that may make the treasurer feel. 

“Why not give him a compassionate and caring feedback session based on the fixes you make each week?” I ventured.  “There is no need to be judgemental, just make a note of the changes and explain them to him.  Make sure that you communicate your appreciation of him doing the job and point out some of the things that are going right as well.” 

To be honest, neither of us expected this approach to make much of a difference, but we felt that it was doing the right thing by the treasurer.  So I was surprised when I met the corps officer a few months later and he reported both a change in attitude and an improvement in accuracy.  (There are a whole load of psychological and practical reasons why this approach works, but that’s for another post maybe.)

Delegation (especially with volunteers) has to geared to both the nature of the person and the nature of the job.

But how can we do this in a quick and easy-to-apply way?

The 3C approach captures three of the most important variable factors to be considered when delegating: the capacity of the worker/volunteer, and the complexity and criticality of the task. 

The capacity of the worker is the degree to which this person has what it takes to do this job.  Two “big ticket” items in helping you assess this quickly and painlessly are in the answers to the questions:

1. Does this person have the right attitude?
2. How well has he/she done this kind of work before?

The complexity of the task is an estimate of how complicated it is, and its

criticality is a reflection of its importance to the success or failure of your section, corps or organisation.  If it’s done badly, will it have a large or small impact?

  

(A full size version of this diagram is available by clicking on the picture.)

If the task is less critical and less complex, then less engagement is required from the leader than if it is more complex and critical.  And the greater the capacity of the worker, the less leader-engagement is required in terms of instruction, supervision and accountability systems. 

 So, what are the take-home messages from all this? 

1.    It is almost always worth delegating, even if you have to monitor closely,

2.    Delegating is never setting and forgetting.  There is always some degree of follow-up required.

Happy delegating!