Strengthen your delegation in 2025 (here's how!)
Happy 2025! I'd like to help you ring in the New Year by empowering you to up your delegation game.
Today I'm covering:
A 5-step delegation exercise
A free, helpful template
2 common challenges with delegation
Why now? Because most of us spent December thinking this:
It's time to face all those “January problems" and intentionally manage the 5,000,000 to-dos you and your team has.
To increase your success and reduce your January stress, let me introduce you to the Delegation Menu.
A tool and concept that, when used on an ongoing basis, speeds up the quality and quantity of your delegation, offering you a menu of solutions as work ebbs and flows.
What it looks like (and this template is linked at the bottom of this email):
Here's how to use it…
Step 1: Map Out Your Work
Reflect on everything that you do.
And then put your work into these 3 categories:
Work only I can do
Work I do because it's “fastest” that way
Work ready to be delegated
This alone is eye-opening for most managers and leaders.
Most of us are doing work we don't need to, and by way of that, most of us are robbing our people of growth opportunities.
Step 2: Evaluate the ROI on Your Time
You may have noticed a pesky little checkbox next to each task in the image above.
This is to help build awareness of the value of our time and how we're using it.
In my experience, some of the things that only I could do, also happened to be low ROI. We won't maximize our impact as managers and leaders if our non-renewable resource (time) is spent in low impact areas.
Step 3: Map Out Your People
Add each team member to the table:
And then identify 3 elements of their work:
Work they're hungry to grow into (and/or get exposure to)
Work that brings them energy
Work that drains their energy
It's fair that you might not know these answers. Perfect! What a fantastic topic for your next 1:1. It might sound like this:
“Kicking off this New Year, I want to more consciously align work, whenever possible, to what energizes each of us. Thinking about what was on your plate last year, what elements of your work really lit you up?
[Listen to their answer - you are peeling back the layers of the onion, don't take the response at face value]
Awesome, now what within that was particularly energizing?
[Listen to their answer - is there another layer to peel back? If so, keep peeling until you get to the root skill/behavior.]
And if you had the opportunity to increase your energizing work by 10%, what might that look like?”
Then take the same tactic to uncover what elements of their work they find to be draining. Again, don't take the face value answer, keep peeling 'til you get to the core.
And finally, have them vocalize the skills, tactics, behaviors, and people they're hungry to learn, grow, and benefit from in 2025.
Step 4: Align Work With Opportunities
With greater insights into work preferences for your people, now revisit the tasks and work on your plate.
Who can you slot in?
How will this help them grow?
What are the mutual benefits?
At this point, you're likely viewing delegation differently. Success!
Step 5: Make a Plan
Loop back to your people with what you've identified as opportunities for growth and energizing work for them.
It's unlikely you'll offload your identified tasks/work immediately.
The point of this is to view your work and your people with greater intention. It's then that you can make a plan and assign timelines.
In some cases, it might be a multi-month process of ramping them up into something new. In other instances, it will be an easy hand off in the coming days/weeks.
Common Challenges
“But Katie, my people don't have the bandwidth, which is why I'm taking these things on.”
Two quick responses:
Revisit priorities & commitments
Remember the speed of energizing work
While overly tight bandwidth issues commonly spark calls for more headcount and resources, the better place to start is revisiting Clarity.
Are priorities clear and attainable?
Are our priorities outpacing our capacity?
I'd encourage taking a hard look at what the team is committed to as it's possible they are over-extended and something needs to be moved to the back burner. You'll likely need to manage up to your leader to make a priority realignment recommendation.
Secondly, how quickly can you complete something that's energizing? How long does it take you to do something that's draining?
Exactly.
When you're hesitating on delegating something that would be something additional on someone's place, AND it happens to be energizing work for them, just remember how quickly we tend to complete things we're into.
“But Katie, what if something I'm needing to delegate isn't energizing?”
It's easy to assume that something that is draining for you is draining to others.
I hate data and reporting. Others LOVE it.
I hate dealing with admin permissions and settings. Others find satisfaction in task completion.
So my message here is to watch your assumptions. That's why we need to be asking folks, not just assuming.
My second suggestion is to then evaluate the extent to which the task would be exposure that would be valuable and aligned to how and where your people want to develop.
Finally, yes, there are elements of all of our work that are not our favorite. Can you find a way to make the boring less boring?
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As promised, here is your free Delegation Menu template for you to be able to kick off 2025 with more intentional delegation.
To Edit, go to File > Make a Copy, and you'll be off to the races!
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That's it for today!
Comment below or email (katie@enduranceboss.com) with your follow up thoughts & questions!
