Cooperation within any team is facilitated where the right people in the team are doing the right tasks and this may involve delegation. Whilst it increases both the productivity of your employees and the profitability of the practice sadly some people struggle to delegate well.
There can be two reasons for poor delegation.
Abdicating not delegating
The first challenge with delegating is that many people do not follow the correct procedures for delegating and instead end up abdicating responsibility instead.
What I mean by that is there can sometimes be a focus of getting tasks off someone’s to do list and so they will simply pass the task completion to someone else with a cursory ‘can you do’ question.
There are some types of people who will simply say ‘yes’ to that question no matter how much work they have already got on their to do list. Similarly, some people will want more information on the task itself.
For delegation to be effective there needs to be more structure to the process. It needs to start with a conversation around the task that is to be delegated to go through what is required, any time frames. It is also important to make sure that the person the task is being passed to understands what is being asked of them and that they have a chance to ask any questions that they might have.
Some of the team might also prefer to have an email request to confirm exactly what needs to be done and by when.
Reluctance to delegate
There can be also reluctance by some accountants to delegate at all because there is a perception that only they can do the job without compromising the quality of the work. Orin some cases a reluctance to delegate because ‘it is quicker to do it myself’.
I understand and appreciate how these thoughts come about and I know that there is no ill-intent meant by them.
But these decisions can affect the profitability of the practice if the partner(s) or practice owners are doing work that someone at amore junior level can do. But as someone who specialises in developing teams, I have to say that these concerns are potentially damaging your employee levels of engagement.
By not delegating things that they perceive that they can do then it sends an indirect message to them that you do not think they are good enough to do it. This harms their levels of motivation and possibly for some people their levels of self-worth.
If we take the first example of believing that your employees cannot do things with the same attention to quality as you, I would say that this most often times is not the case. Yes, there is a degree of knowledge and experience that you as partner will have that your team may not have. But for many compliance tasks that is simply not enough of a reason not to delegate to your team.
The ironic thing here for me is that when we recruit our natural tendencies are to recruit people that we like and most often we like them because they are similar to us and this expands out to and is driven by the fact that we have similar DiSC profiles.
If you are heavily focused on the quality aspects of the compliance service (the C profile) then the chances are your team will have that profile too and so they will want to do the perfect job just like you so give them a chance.
I would love to know what your experiences of delegation are and what if any challenges you have faced. Leave me a comment below or drop me a direct message or email joanne@smartsupportforbusiness.co.uk
