Understanding the Five Levels of Delegation

As the boss, you’re in a position to offload many of your business’ responsibilities to your employees. That’s more or less why you have employees in the first place. However, there’s more than one way that you can delegate tasks, depending on your personal style of management and the work style of each of your employees.

Let’s summarize the different levels of delegation that you can adopt as you guide your team members.

1. Fully Hands-On

Different people, depending on their experience with a task or even their overall work style, will need varying levels of oversight in order to complete it effectively and efficiently. Someone who requires this level of delegation needs you to be very involved in their process, guiding them from step to step and helping keep them on track.

This level of oversight is distinguishable from the others by how concrete these processes are. At this level, you are effectively giving your team a set of specific instructions to be followed to the letter.

2. Reporting and Guidance

At this level of delegation, you’re still the one making the final call, but your employees are the ones tasked with collecting information and presenting it to you. As such, they’ll still need you to point them in the right direction, but they should have some freedoms to fit their increased responsibilities as well.

Once your team member has collected this information, the decision making is still on you, but the responsibility for executing more of the plan should fall to your staff member.

3. Balanced Recommendations

This level of delegation is far more collaborative than the others, as it involves both you and your team member working together in order to accomplish your desired outcome in more equal measure. Your team members should not only be responsible for collecting data for you, but also for contributing their opinion into what the appropriate next steps would be.

While the final say will ultimately still be yours, your team members’ input is an essential asset that will have an impact on your final decision.

4. Informed Independence

At this level of delegation, you trust your team members to act independently, making decisions for themselves based on their own research and insights, keeping you informed throughout the process. This last facet is key—the fact that they are keeping you apprised throughout the process and remaining accountable for the task you have assigned to them.

This allows you to accomplish everything that needs to be done in a timely manner, maintaining your oversight while not overburdening yourself in the process.

5. True Independence

This final variety of delegation should be reserved for those employees who have proven themselves to be capable and reliable, as they will have full autonomy in the process at hand. Your team member is wholly responsible for making all the decisions and completing all the required tasks as they are assigned to them.

As you might imagine, you need to have built up a significant amount of trust in any of your team members that you take this approach with, but if you can reach it, this will help allow them to be more productive and take up less of your time, alike.

Give Your Team the Tools to Collaborate, However Their Tasks are Delegated

We can help. As one of the best options for businesses in Oregon seeking out IT services, we can make sure your entire team has everything they need to accomplish what is expected of them—and with our support, you can be confident that they’re able to put these resources to use. Give us a call at (503) 278-5011 to learn more about the benefits that managed IT can bring to your business.