How To Delegate Work To Employees: A Leadership Imperative

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Trust. Confidence. Commitment. Engagement. This is what it means for your employees and team members when you delegate meaningful work to them. Delegating can sometimes feel uneasy, uncomfortable or scary. You can set yourself up to succeed by understanding why you should delegate work and how to do it most effectively.

When you delegate tasks and assignments, you send positive and strong messages: messages that you trust your team; messages that you have confidence in the talents and abilities of your employees; messages that you are committed to their professional development; and messages that you want to interact and engage on a higher level.

Delegating work to employees is a leadership imperative.

Delegation is more than an action; it’s an outward and significant representation of effective leadership and supervisory skills. By delegating work to employees, you’re pulling at one of the best threads available for employee and leadership development.

Far too many in positions of authority lack the skill, will or ability to appropriately delegate, and this leadership failure produces a wide-range of negative consequences for organizational and employee effectiveness.

See, delegation isn’t about a management style. It’s not about a leadership style, and it’s not a matter of preference. Delegating to employees is a leadership imperative just like making effective decisions, creating great work environments, managing and balancing budgets and demonstrating strategic thinking.

Delegating, by the very nature of the word, indicates that you are entrusting someone else to do work that you would ordinarily be charged with doing—work that comes under the scope of your authority and portfolio. In the best instances, supervisors and leaders delegate work that would interest, challenge and/or stretch an employee’s abilities, skills and thinking in meaningful ways.

What is your intention as a supervisor or leader?
How much time do you spend developing your employees?
And how do you go about it?

How to effectively delegate work to employees.

As a supervisor, it is incumbent upon you to create an environment for those you lead to do their very best work. You have an obligation to challenge and develop your team and employees as part of your overall leadership responsibility. And, as a strategic leader, you likely want to buttress institution-wide strategic thinking and innovation.

Effectively delegating work assignments helps to achieve these ends. Here’s how to go about it.

Four (4) essential steps of delegation learned through trial and error.

Kerry Jefferson, U.S. Air Force veteran, experienced supervisor and independent contractor, provides leaders and supervisors with a straightforward and easy-to-follow process for how to master the art of delegation. If you want to delegate effectively, apply these four (4) essential steps.

Set the Right Environment. People thrive in trust-filled spaces where expectations are clear.
Assign Thoughtfully. Understand the strengths of your team. Give people tasks that play to their talents and passions.
Hand Off with Purpose. Don’t just toss them the ball—explain the game plan. Provide context, set goals, and outline deliverables.
Monitor without Hovering. Keep track of progress without suffocating creativity or initiative.

After reading Jefferson’s article, I reached out to get more of his thinking on the topic. His experiences help us to contemplate the benefits of delegating work and to better understand how to realize success with doing so.

Jefferson advocates for a culture of accountability and advises managers and supervisors that, “delegation isn’t just about assigning tasks; it’s about empowering others with the tools, trust, and clarity they need to succeed. The biggest danger is micromanaging—it undermines trust and defeats the purpose of delegation. Great delegation creates accountability and growth for everyone involved.”

In addition to the four essential steps outlined above, you can bolster the effectiveness of your delegation decisions with these key strategies in mind.

Delegate work for the right reasons.

You can delegate effectively, and you can do so effectively and for the right reasons. I first began supervising employees back in 1998. At that time, and for a few years afterwards, I delegated work responsibilities out of sheer necessity to lighten my load. During times where I lacked operational capacity to manage everything on my plate, I delegated.

While this is a worthwhile reason to delegate assignments, it is not the only—or even the best—reason to do so. The better reason to delegate work assignments is because employees can (and often want to) tackle stretch assignments or take on different tasks outside the norm.

Employees, specifically high performers, seek out ways to add value. They want to feel needed. They want to contribute to team and organizational success. They want to be challenged to do more and contribute differently—so by all means, let them.

Delegate the right type of work.

Delegating should not be used as a way to unburden yourself of menial, grunt work. That work has to be done, yes. But you shouldn’t delegate it. Instead, you should create a position and specifically hire separately for it or make clear (across the organizational culture) that all employees have parts of the job they find tedious. No one really likes every single aspect of the duties they’re required to perform, but we need to do them anyway.

With this in mind, note that with delegation, the meaning of the work matters; the value of the work matters; the message sent to employees matters.

Asking an employee to get you coffee is not delegating.
Assigning an employee grunt work is not delegating.
Handing an employee busy work that you don’t value or simply don’t want to do is not delegating.
Turning over tedious, repetitive work tasks to an employee is not delegating.

Delegating is about giving your employees a time to learn, to grow, to shine and to expand while also helping to lighten your load and achieve organizational goals. It’s a mutually beneficial way to get important work done. When you assign your employees value-added tasks and assignments (beyond their normal/typical work demands) you are delegating. Delegating to employees means to give them work that would ordinarily be on your plate—meaningful work that is in your portfolio.

If you don’t delegate responsibilities—beyond the grunt work—you will fail to develop your people, and you will fail to inspire the kind of trust, confidence, commitment and engagement necessary to achieve organizational strategic goals.

Delegate work to the right people.

Delegation is not training. Yes, it’s a development opportunity but an opportunity best suited for someone whose skills closely align with the task at hand. When you delegate tasks, assignments or projects, indeed you want them to get done and get done well. Start with selecting the right person or people for the job.

The goal is that you, the employee(s), the team and the organization will feel good and look good when all is said and done. Delegating work assignments to the wrong people can lead to all sorts of problems within the team and, ultimately, have you dealing with low-grade outcomes that take more time than you ever intended to produce.

Delegating work to the wrong person also risks a situation where—after many frustrations, inefficiencies and inadequacies—you still end up putting in lots of your own time and effort to do the very work you delegated, only now you’re out of time, over budget and far less effective.

There is a time and space for training, but when the gap between employees’ current abilities and those necessary for the assignment is too wide, delegate the assignment to more prepared and skilled employees. You shouldn’t forget about employees with wide skill gaps; you should train them for future opportunities. But in the meantime, find other, better-matched employees to delegate assignments.

Delegate the work and then—get out of the way.

Have you ever been labeled a micromanager? It’s okay if delegation doesn’t necessarily come naturally to you. Many managers and supervisors struggle with letting go—letting go of the work product, letting go of control, letting go of creative influence, etc.

You might also struggle with trust or the lack thereof—a lack of trust that the employee will be as invested in the results as you are; a lack of trust that the employee will make the you look good; a lack of trust that the employee will keep you in the loop and finish on time and within budget.

This feeling of unease with delegating work is natural. Delegating work can be scary and uncomfortable, especially at first. This doesn’t, however, mean that you shouldn’t do it. Here are tips to manage delegation and reduce any micromanagement tendencies that might creep up.

Remind yourself that you are not completely letting go. As the supervisor, you’re required to remain involved. You don’t give up all control when you delegate assignments. You ultimately bear responsibility for the results, the timing and the budget.
Outline what success looks like. Get input from those you will delegate the work to, but you need to define the outcomes and then let the employee create a plan and set the path to get there.
Establish performance standards and communication protocols. And also follow up along the way. When you delegate work, you want to ensure your employees have enough autonomy and support to deliver on the outcomes you’ve defined. You also want to ensure that everyone understands how often—and in what methods—communication needs to occur.
Set your employees up for success by making yourself available when they need you. As part of the job of creating an environment for your team members to do their best work, you should do these two things exceptionally well: (1) provide resources and (2) remove obstacles. Your employees can’t deliver the best outcomes and make you look good if they don’t have what they need to succeed.

The important thing here is that, as supervisor, you own your parts for the assignments or projects and give your employees the space and authority to own their parts as well. Delegation should be a mutually beneficial approach to achieving team and organizational success, and—when effectively done—it will be a fulfilling experience for both, employees and supervisors.