Everyone
knows leaders should delegate to ensure that they are working on the right
projects and deliverables. But if you find yourself frequently
miscommunicating with your team on deliverables, hearing about issues at the
last minute, and misunderstanding how your team set their priorities, it may be
a sign you’ve delegated too much, leaving their employees to feel abandoned and
unmotivated. At that point, it’s important to take back responsibility for
certain tasks to insure you’re providing your team the guidance and structure
they need. Here are three steps you can take.
Take on a symbolic
project. Obviously, you don’t
want to overcorrect and start doing a myriad of low-level tasks in order to
reconnect with your team. But taking on a symbolic project or task can be a
visible way of demonstrating your re-engagement, as well as helping the company
and advancing your own learning goals. For instance, I coached one senior
advertising executive who realized she had delegated too much. She decided to
get back into the details by learning a new piece of software. This gave her a
new skill to share with other leaders in the company and her own team. Her time
spent on the software also helped in the long run because when it was time to
delegate, she understood all of the specifics of getting the work accomplished.
Reset with your team. One CTO I coached realized he’d been delegating too much
because he no longer had proper visibility into what his teams were working
on. He’d been frustrated that departmental projects he had
delegated — such
as a dashboard and internal training, (which he felt would differentiate their
department in the marketplace) got lost and forgotten with looming client
deadlines. To combat this, he scheduled an offsite to
reconfirm the vision for the department and get everyone on the same page again
about goals and expectations.
