Written by: Luca Berni, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The theme of delegation is one of the most frequently discussed in the various courses on the development of Leadership or managerial skills because delegation is a complex process that involves many of Manager's skills and some aspects of his personal sphere. To delegate, in fact, it is necessary to be able to establish priorities, to be able to motivate, to be able to communicate, to be able to define goals correctly and to be able to evaluate the results. But not only. The manager has to deal with their personal attitude to control, their inclination to trust or not, and their flexibility in accepting unforeseen solutions.
Delegating is not easy, but with some tricks, you can greatly improve your ability to assign tasks to people. But these tricks are useless if it is not clarified that there are two types of delegation.
Process delegation
This is the way to delegate that you shouldn't do, but unfortunately, it's the most common. Process delegation usually begins with a manager who entrusts a job to one of his collaborators, without defining the expected results with him, but listing the operations he will have to carry out to complete the activity. That way the Manager is delegating a process with the illusion that the collaborator does the job exactly as he had in mind. This is unfortunately not possible, because each of us thinks differently and follows different mental patterns. Let's take an example. What is usually the reaction we get when we first look at a spreadsheet (such as Excel) created by someone else? It is very rarely positive. And if we had asked the person to create it, certainly the result is not what we would have expected and we give this judgment well before having verified the actual effectiveness of the file. This is normal, because a spreadsheet is created based on the mental processes of those who create it, certainly different from those of those who read it, but no less effective for this.
From what has been said, when a process is delegated, one remains dissatisfied with the work performed, regardless of its effectiveness and, very often, Managers fall into the trap of heavily modifying it or even redoing it, losing all the advantages of delegation, and making their work heavier.
Result delegation
Delegating a result is much more unnatural, but definitely more effective. Delegating a result means assigning a task to a collaborator by discussing only what the final result should be, for what purpose it should be useful, what characteristics it should have, and the deadline. The whole path to obtain the result (the "process") will be chosen by the collaborator in total freedom. The Manager will intervene only at the specific request of the collaborator, should he find himself in difficulty or should face obstacles beyond his sphere of competence. Obviously, the Manager must be ready to accept that the collaborator follows a different process from the one he would have followed, provided that the result is equally (or even more) effective.
Process delegation Vs. Result delegation
| Process delegation | Result delegation |
Effectiveness
| Medium (The collaborator is more focused on meeting the Manager's expectations than on the result) | High (The employee is focused on the result and is encouraged to go beyond the obvious solutions) |
Efficiency
| Low (The Manager is led to a continuous check of the progress of the work, wasting a lot of time) | High (The Manager intervenes only when requested, or at the end, recovering time to devote to something else) |
Motivation | Very low (The employee does not feel valued and the feeling of constant control creates unnecessary stress and can decrease the level of self-esteem) | High (The collaborator perceives trust and feels he can act independently, this encourages him to use all his best resources) |
Learning | Low (When the collaborator slavishly follows a sequence of operations defined by others, he is not stimulated to learn and evolve) | Very high (When the collaborator experiments on his own initiative, he is stimulated to learn from his successes and his failures, for the benefit of subsequent times) |
Luca Berni, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Luca Berni is an Executive & Team Coach that works with Leaders, Top Managers, Entrepreneurs, Boards of Directors, and Leadership Teams. Before becoming a Coach in 2009, he worked as a Manager in different Multinational companies in different Countries for almost twenty years. Luca also works as a management consultant, he co-founded and runs TheNCS The Neuroscience Coaching School, and he writes articles and books about Coaching and Management.
