Five tips on how to delegate effectively

In a recent episode of APM Podcast, Jo Owen and Andy Alder gave their expert tips on how to be a brilliant delegator. Owen is a leadership guru and author, while Alder is Managing Director of Major Infrastructure Delivery at Anglian Water (and former Thames Tideway Programme Director). Here’s what they had to say.

1. Have the right mindset

Trust is the most important thing when it comes to delegation.

“If you trust your team, you will delegate to them, because you know you can delegate to them,” says Owen. “If you don’t trust your team, you’re never going to delegate to them – either you’ve got the wrong team or the team has the wrong manager.”

Your job, as a manager of highly skilled professionals, is not to be the smartest person in the room, he explains. “Your job is to get the smartest people into the room and let them solve the problems for you.”

While it might be tempting (and feel natural) to take on the most challenging problems all for yourself, Owen urges you to curb your control-freak tendencies and instead to trust your team and to delegate to them.

“They will respond really positively, because people respond when they are trusted. When they’re trusted, they want to rise to the challenge, and they will be motivated to do well for you. And when you delegate to them, they will learn and develop and become even more valuable team members,” he adds.

2. Delegation is empowerment

“Small projects are long-term things often, and megaprojects are very long-term things,” says Alder. “Part of your role as a leader is not just to get the job done, but also to develop the team for that project and for future projects.”

This means accepting that some of the process of delegation and empowerment is going to be a learning activity for everybody on the project team. It’s also a long-term process. “That’s a very valid part of what project management is all about,” Alder explains.

3. Be a servant leader

As a project manager or leader, you’re managing a team of experts of different disciplines.

“You can’t possibly know more than they do about those disciplines,” says Alder. “Thames Tideway was a good example of that. We had 21 sites, with project managers for each site. They knew far more about each site and the challenges, issues, risks and stakeholders than I could ever think to try and learn.

“It’s a servant leadership thing in some way: recognising that those folk know most about that project and that your role, as the overall leader or programme manager, is to support those project managers in delivering their projects. You also need to make sure they’ve been integrated and are sharing practice and learning between them and coordinating things.”

4. Be clear on your role

One of the traps of delegation is to start by asking the wrong question, Owen explains.

“Managers ask: what can I delegate? And the answer is a very short list, if you look at it that way. So, I tend to encourage managers to ask the opposite question, which is: what is it that I absolutely cannot delegate under any circumstances whatsoever? And again, you come up with a very short list – and that short list defines where you as a manager really add value. If you just focus on that, then everything else goes and you can do quite radical delegation.”

5. Step back when the pressure ramps up

“When projects have got some challenges – where there’s a really tricky interface or a really difficult piece of work – that’s the time when you have to really trust your ability to delegate,” says Alder.

“There’s this tendency when something is really difficult that you feel you just need to get it done – that someone more senior needs to come in and take over, because it’s more difficult. But that’s the worst thing you can do. That is the time to just lean in and support the team more. Really trust the team who do this day-in and day-out and who are really good at what they do. You’ve empowered them to do that.

“You stay there and support them when it’s challenging, rather than potentially take that empowerment away when things get a bit difficult.”

Listen to APM Podcast’s episode on how to delegate effectively on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other platforms – or listen via browser.