A friend recently posted her professional goals on LinkedIn. She is a highly technical product manager at a large tech corporation, with questions regarding how to delegate tasks when a project requires the support of low performing employees and teams. I suspect her problem is one that all experienced leaders have faced. It is easy to lead when things are going well, but how do leaders elevate performance when the team, as a whole, is disengaged?
I often come across leaders who see delegation as only a tool for managing their to-do lists. It certainly does that, but like most resources, delegation can be utilized to accomplish multiple objectives. To address the original question, how do you delegate to an underperforming team? The partial answer is to delegate with intention. As is often the case in business, your problem is also your opportunity.
An unordered and incomplete list of considerations:
What is the risk if the task/ project fails?A relatively minor task can be easily delegated to almost anyone. Sometimes we have members on our team who, frankly, we don’t know particularly well. Perhaps they are new, work in a different office, or perhaps their contributions are easily overlooked. Either way, low-risk tasks present opportunities to connect and build trust.
What do your people want?Not just from you, but from their career, their current role, and their time with the company. Perhaps you have a jr. project manager with an ambition to become a product manager. They might be a candidate for responsibilities providing visibility to engineering practices. Could a task help bridge where they are with where they aim to be?
Who has skills they may not be using?Is the delegated task to support a team that may be great at planning but sometimes falls short on execution? Perhaps you have a team member who is strong at execution but sometimes struggles with planning. Delegation to them creates an opportunity to build from their strength instead of correcting weaknesses.
Who else will participate in the task?Many of us took indirect routes into our careers. As a result, we hold wisdom our employers are not utilizing. For example, a UX designer with an accounting degree has added insight when building business tools. Could overlooked skills benefit the team or task? Are we missing opportunities to demonstrate outside expertise?
Why is the task being delegated?Perhaps your team is overloaded and will be adding a new position soon. Do you have a strong internal candidate in mind? Familiarity with the role can only help position them as an obvious, seamless choice.
Zoom out from individual responsibilities, and ask big picture questions.
Why is the team as a whole underperforming? Have we root-caused the issues? Are we as leaders positioning people to succeed? Do we understand colleague goals, ambitions, and priorities? Are we supporting them in those things? Can we use something as simple as a to-do list to demonstrate, through our actions, that we care about their motivations?
Strong leaders can and do. Plenty of buzz words exist (servant-leadership, horizontal management, etc) but the objectives are the same. We know we can’t, and shouldn’t order teams to be high velocity. We can’t make employees care about their responsibilities, but we can be good stewards of their potential while building from existing motivations. Many underperforming teams can be improved when mentored differently. As always, exercise good judgment. Beware of inadvertently expanding position requirements without also expanding access to resources, adjusting job title, and pay grade. Ask why the norm is underperformance, and consider where delegation can address limiting factors.
Photographs by Kelly Sikkema, via UnSplash.