Delegate and Empower Your Team
I work with leaders across many industries as an executive coach. A common refrain I hear is how busy they are. In essence, they feel they spend too much time fighting fires and working on day-to-day tactics, and not enough time on strategy that will move the organization forward.
Basically, leaders who operate in this mode feel time bankrupt. Oftentimes, these same leaders also tend to suffer from achiever’s dilemma — working even longer hours to get everything done, creating an unsustainable work-life balance.
Sound familiar?
Working with an experienced coach can help put you back in control.
Coaches often help leaders identify personality traits, saboteurs or fears that may cause them to take on too much themselves, rather than develop their staff through delegation and empowerment. Some common excuses coaches hear from leaders who struggle with being too busy include:
- It will be done faster if I do it myself.
- I know it will be done right if I do it.
- People will think I’m cherry picking the good projects and dumping the bad ones when I delegate to them.
Coaches help leaders understand delegation is a vital step in team development that enhances organizational capability and allows them to operate on a more strategic level to drive long-term success.
Using tools such as assessments, stakeholder interviews or 360’s, coaches gain an understanding of a leader’s areas of strength, as well as identify a leader’s development opportunities. Assessments help pinpoint personality traits that inhibit delegating. Stakeholder interviews and 360’s can point out other issues with delegation, trust, or staff development also.
When information from assessments, interviews or 360’s demonstrate reluctance to delegate, trust or develop others, coaches have the necessary information to educate leaders on how these tendencies are holding them back and keeping them in day-to-day tactical and fire-fighting mode.
Coaches then partner with leaders on new methods, behaviors, and exercises to improve in these areas while also keeping or amplifying their areas of strength.
Becoming involved and seeking input on areas where staff members want more opportunity to grow and demonstrate autonomy as well as their readiness for more responsibility is key to helping leaders delegate and develop their teams, too. Conversations with team members on their development helps the leader understand the importance of becoming more of a coach and less of a doer. Team members typically appreciate coaching as opposed to direct oversight; it instills feelings of freedom to operate and trust.
Leaders who work with coaches on delegation skills usually find that their staffs can take on more responsibility and want to demonstrate their own leadership capabilities. This allows for further staff development, which increases morale and retention while freeing up time leaders can devote to more strategic endeavors. Developed team members also are more engaged and empowered, thus allowing the enterprise to achieve more.
How can coaching help you or leaders in your organization delegate more, develop team members, work less, and achieve more?
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Lance Hazzard, PCC, CPCC, is an Executive Team Coach and a certified Intelligent Leadership Executive Coach helping people and organizations achieve success. Lance and Eric T. Hicks, Ph.D., co-authored Accelerating Leadership, published in June 2019. Lance is Executive Coach and President at Oppnå® Executive & Achievement Coaching. More information on the book, Lance and Oppnå® Coaching can be found at the links below: