My entire office is prepar­ing for a move to a new loca­tion at the end of year. Part of that prepa­ra­tion includes clean­ing our offices of all unnec­es­sary paper and mate­ri­als. For­tu­nately, I am the com­plete oppo­site of a pack rat, and I tend to scan most things given to me in paper form. I scan and save them elec­tron­i­cally. No mat­ter how I try, though, paper builds up. With­out ques­tion, the largest col­lec­tion of paper, book­lets, and binders in my office comes from train­ing pro­grams and courses that I have attended. I kept a lot of the train­ing mate­ri­als, because most had some good infor­ma­tion that I thought might be use­ful at some point in the future. Nev­er­the­less, I have to get rid of most of this stuff. While stand­ing at the shred bin, dump­ing the con­tents of sev­eral binders, a small note card fell out with the head­ing “DELEGATION.” I stopped Oper­a­tion Purge for a moment to read my notes on this card. I imme­di­ately took a pic­ture of the card and uploaded it into a folder in Spring­pad. It occurred to me that I might not be the only one who has occa­sional strug­gles with effec­tive del­e­ga­tion, so I thought that shar­ing my notes might be help­ful to others.

Just in case you can’t read my writing…

DELEGATION

Before

Deter­mine the task
Deter­mine the staff needed
Time

• When is it due

• Expe­di­ency
• Staff devel­op­ment
• Man­ager involvement

Dur­ing

Agree on the scope of the tast
Set expec­ta­tions
Explain why the del­e­ga­tion was made
Set due dates
Remove bar­ri­ers
Estab­lish open com­mu­ni­ca­tion
Be flexible

After

Eval­u­ate result/Feedback
Give credit/recognition
Dis­cuss any next steps

 
 
 
If these notes are help­ful, please feel free to share the link to this post with oth­ers. You can also save a copy of the pic­ture of my note card (Flickr), or down­load a PDF copy of the note text. (Drop­box).