The Importance of Delegation
Everyone who has a brain stresses the importance of delegation in business. However, after many years of doing just that (but not nearly well enough) I want to express the following caveats:
1) Delegation is very time consuming and difficult to do properly. It requires all kinds of training, followup, damage control, etc.
2) No matter how good the delegater the delegatee will usually do a worse job than the delegater, unless the delegatee is a highly-paid expert in his/her field. Passing the work onto a cheap grunt is a recipe for less than perfect results, though that is not necessarily a reason not to do it anyway.
3) Sometimes it is proper to do the work oneself for a while to develop the system properly before delegating it. A properly designed system is much easier to delegate and will work better for longer. Don’t expect a delegatee to refine and improve your system for you unless s/he is well-paid.
4) If you are serious about delegation, here is how to delegate certain tasks (those that will be delegated to an inferior, and not to an expert):
For every task that you do take very careful notes how you do it. Organize these notes into a list of actions for each task so that someone can just follow the list of actions to do it. When doing the tasks refer back to your own notes and revise and improve the notes as you revise and improve the way you do the tasks. Then when you are ready to delegate it to an inferior the person will just have to follow the notes and the task will get done more or less properly. The better the note the cheaper the delegatee can be.
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