Using Delegation to Nurture Your Next Generation of Managers

Your managers are not only responsible for delegating tasks, but they are also responsible for imparting knowledge and responsibility to their team. Done correctly this is of immeasurable value to your business, it not only gets work done, but it trains people for future assignments. This means your company has a consistent pool of trained and qualified people for middle and upper management positions.

This is the heart of infrastructure optimization, finding your training and selecting the best candidates from within your company. Being in this position means your company has a large organic knowledge base, it strengthens the core framework of your company, and the opportunities for advancement motivate employees.

How do managers get to know their team members and properly train them?

The only way for your managers to get to know their team members is to reach out to them, both formally and informally. Ask and observe how they learn best, what kinds of tasks they would like doing, and what they hope to get out of their current positions.

As they train the new person, your managers should observe how employees respond to different types of instruction. See if they are interested, especially if they don’t seem to be responding to the training or the task appropriately, have them try a different tact.

If this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is a lot of work, and it takes time.

However, managers who take the time to learn about their staff, to understand how they think and act, and place the right task with the right people, will get a lot more from the team. Plus, you will have happy employees who don’t feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities.

Your Company Will Only Benefit

As you learn about your employees and their strengths and weaknesses, you will learn who is a good fit for each position in the company, and who might do better in another department. If you give them some small leadership responsibilities, you’ll also learn who shows promise for advancement.

If you practice this process, all you invest in infrastructure optimization is time and training resources. Resources have had to spend anyway; the only difference is your managers have to pay a little more attention to employees. However, what you have gained is prospective candidates for future leadership jobs, benefited from placing employees in positions that make the best use of their skills, and employees who know you and your management team consider them to be in career positions, not just holding jobs.

What Managers Get Out Of This Process

Proper delegation is a big piece of infrastructure optimization. When managers learn to delegate appropriately, they are freeing themselves up to focus on the essential things of their job. More importantly, they can do what they were hired to do, and want to do, lead.

Handing out tasks is only a small part of being a manager. A manager’s real job is to lead, measure results, and make the proper adjustments to optimize the team for the highest results possible. This is what a competent manager can do, but it’s only possible with a well-functioning team.

Proper delegation is part of leadership development. It’s one of the keys to the success and survival of your organization.

Equal Parts are experts at helping companies with infrastructure optimization. If you have any questions or comments about this article, feel free to contact us. We partner with numerous organizations and help them improve their efficiency by making better use of their current resources, and helping them develop better leaders.