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Delegation is one of the most important management techniques. It pursues two major goals:

• Free up the manager’s time to do more productive tasks (for example, accept the tasks delegated by her manager)
• Professionally grow the employee

In other words, delegation is the mechanism that powers growth and promotion.

Unfortunately, delegation is often accompanied by issues. Here are the typical ones:

• It is simply not done. Most managers don’t delegate at all and continue working long hours trying to do everything themselves. It negatively impacts their professional growth, because these managers cannot find time to start working on higher-level tasks.
• Delegating wrong activities. A good activity to delegate is the one that you understand very well, that is not central to your responsibilities, and is not critical to the organization.
• Delegating to a wrong person. Select a person who has the necessary skills, and who is willing to take more responsibilities. Usually, managers underestimate capabilities of their reports.
• Throwing the task “over the wall”. You cannot simply tell your report “starting from Monday you are responsible for X” and hope that from now on it will be done right. Successful delegation requires good planning, execution, and control. It is not a one-time event, it is a smooth transition.
• No follow-up. After the activity becomes the employee’s responsibility, there is not enough control and feedback.

Doing delegation right is not that hard, it just requires a little discipline. Here is how to start delegating in seven simple steps.

Step 1. Select a task

As with many other activities, it is hard to do it first time, but after the first delegation is a success, the second time is much easier. Therefore, to start, look at your responsibilities and select a simple recurring activity that you know very well and that is not critically important. It does not have to consume a lot of your time – remember, the purpose of this first task is just to teach you how to delegate.

Avoid selecting a task that is too mundane, so that the employee would think that the only motivation for you is making your life easier and unloading all “dirty work”.

Step 2. Select a person

Then select an employee you want to delegate the task to. You need to select a person

• Who is not satisfied with the status quo and who wants to do more
• For whom the task has the right level of complexity – not too simple, not too hard. Ideally, the task should be a little above what the person is regularly doing and/or carry some additional public authority.
• Whose character is compatible with the nature of the task

Step 3. Do some planning

Before talking to the selected employee, come up with the answers to the following questions:

• What exactly the task is about?
• What training/information should I give to my employee?
• How long the transition will probably take?
• How the success of this activity can be measured?
• How often do I need to follow-up on the progress?
• How to decide when the transition is completed?

Write the answers down.

Step 4. Discuss the plan with the employee and get commitment

Schedule a one-on-one meeting with your employee. During the meeting, follow the following scenario:

1. Explain the purpose of the meeting – basically “there is an activity that I need to delegate and I thought that it could be a good task for you”.
2. Briefly describe the activity, why it is important, and why the employee will benefit from taking it over.
3. Ask if she would agree to accept it. If the employee does not like the idea, try to understand why and discuss it. If even after the explanation, the employee still does not like it, maybe you have selected a wrong employee for delegating this task.
4. After you got the general commitment, discuss the plan you have prepared in the previous step. Make sure that you discuss the transition process, success criteria, expected timeline, and schedule for checking the progress. Provide the necessary information and documentation.
5. Ask the employee to absorb the information and come up with suggestions and improvements. Schedule a follow-up meeting in a day or two to kick-off the transition.

Step 5. Kick-off and make the announcements

Get together with the employee and discuss her questions and suggestions. If there are no major concerns or roadblocks, kick-off the transition. If the activity involves other people in the organization, make sure that the change is announced. Make sure that the first time you do it together with the employee.

Step 6. Follow-up and provide feedback

Follow-up with the employee according to your plan. Make sure that you give a lot of feedback to make corrections and don’t forget about positive feedback!

Make sure you keep careful notes and use them for your follow-ups. Use some combination of your favorite calendar and task management systems.

Step 7. Complete the transition

Your original plan should have included some criteria on how to decide when the transition is complete. Usually it looks like “if after X months the activity is being done right…” (the definition of “right” shall be more specific).

When this condition is met, get together with the employee, announce the completion, and celebrate. It is a good time to send a “thank you” letter or make a public announcement at the team meeting.

That is it. Happy delegation!

What Is Wrong With Annual Performance Reviews?

Long performance appraisal cycles that are common in most companies do not work well. There are several reasons for that:

• The manager’s assessment of the employee’s performance usually depends on her latest impression about the person and even her mood that day. There is no way a manager could objectively assess the behavior of the employee during the entire 12‑month cycle. It is a well-known issue and it is massively exploited by employees who noticeably improve their performance a week or two before the review time to leave a good impression in their manager’s memory.
• Similarly, making major decisions, like promoting or dismissing an employee, also requires unbiased evaluation of a long series of multiple small events, because such decisions are rarely made based upon a single major event.
• Some managers tend to postpone giving feedback (both corrective and reaffirming) until the performance review. This makes the feedback absolutely ineffective, because it breaks the causality relationship between the behavior and the feedback.
• In many companies the salary increases and/or promotions are tightly associated with annual performance reviews and employees automatically expect to have their compensation raised if the review is positive. However, the compensation decisions depend on many business and economic factors and are often made a few levels of management higher up the food chain. Therefore, quite often managers already know that they cannot give a raise to a solid performer even if she deserves it. By submitting an excellent review not be supported by a raise, they risk that the motivation of the employee will be seriously damaged, so many managers tone down the positive and come up with some negative points to support the “no raise” decision.

Because of these problems annual performance reviews gained bad reputation, and most people consider them to be a necessary formality, painful for both the manager and the employee.

A Better Way

In order to fix these problems, managers need to switch to much shorter performance appraisal cycles or, ideally, just do it continuously. Long cycles may remain, for instance, for reviewing the data and making major decisions, but the focus of documenting the performance and discussing it with the employee shall be shifted to short cycles.

A good manager already has a short-cycle framework in place – the one-on-one meeting with each direct report. During these weekly, or sometimes bi-weekly, meetings the manager and the employee discuss the performance-related items. Therefore, the only missing element is collecting the performance statistics.

The approach described below addresses this problem. It is easy to carry out and it brings valuable side-effects, like more disciplined approach to one-on-one meetings, task assignment, and feedback. In the examples below, I show how to do it using MyDirects.com online management system, but you can achieve similar results using Word documents, paper notebooks, or clay tablets.

Step 1

Establish a system to collect notes about each of your reports. If you decided to use MyDirects, just go to www.MyDirects.com and sign up for an account.

Step 2

Make sure that you have regular one-on-one meetings with your reports. If you don’t – focus your effort on this first before even thinking about improving your performance review appraisals. Setting up effective one-on-one meetings will bring you enormous value by itself.

Step 3

Start collecting performance data points. Such data points will be coming from many directions:

• You assigned a specific task to your direct and she completed it
• You observe some behavior of your direct
• You receive feedback from other people.

Your immediate reaction in most of such situations would be to give feedback to your direct report. Immediately after that you should take a short note and categorize it as good, or bad, or whatever other categories you prefer. The challenge is to do this regularly and here is where a good note-taking system really helps.

Here is how it is done in MyDirects. When you assign a task to your report, you record it in the system. When the task is completed, you just flag it either as “good”, “bad”, or “slow”. In the example below, the person created a good report (green “thumbs-up”), but it took him too long (yellow “too slow”).

You can use exactly the same mechanism to record any notes about the employee, not necessarily tasks:

Let me repeat – make sure that every time you record a performance data point, you give the employee positive (reaffirming) or negative (corrective) feedback. Don’t wait for annual reviews and don’t even wait for your weekly one-on-ones. The sooner you give the feedback after the event, the more effective it will be.

Step 4

Make sure you review your notes before each one-on-one meeting, and discuss the recent performance data points and review the status of assigned tasks during the meeting. After the meeting, make sure that you document the results:

• if some tasks have been completed, document the performance and give feedback
• if new tasks have been assigned, enter them into the system
• if the performance data shows a clear trend in your direct’s behavior, discuss it with the employee and act on it.

MyDirects provides several convenient reports for this purpose:

• One-on-one meeting form with all current notes and other relevant information. This allows printing the notes out before the meeting to avoid staring at the computer screen during the face-to-face meeting.
• List of notes for arbitrary period of times. Can be filtered in several ways.
• Performance report for the last six months.

This last one deserves a picture:

It gives an interesting view at the performance history – it shows the overall performance statistics, how the performance evolved in time, and provides relevant examples.

Step 5

The approach described above is a more effective mechanism for adjusting the performance of your employees compared to annual reviews.

You still could have a longer cycle, such as your existing annual or semi-annual reviews, to review the long-term trends, but it becomes much less important.