Leadership Lessons: Delegating, Empowerment, and Strategic Alignment

Getting your organization strategically aligned through delegation

There are good habits that we hope all of our supervisors and managers have to help them handle the often powerful and complex challenges of leadership. Bill Gates once said:

"Virtually every company will be going out and empowering with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes - thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before." --Bill Gates

Some Perspective

Leaders who regularly delegate are strategically aligned with their employees to improve business processes and provide feedback. This engages employees so that they are reciprocally aligned with their leaders.

Delegating demonstrates trust and encourages development. When you have these two factors at work in your organization, you have a positive environment in which empowered employees are focused on organizational goals.

By delegating responsibilities and projects with clear communication, the bonds of the team are strengthened, manager-employee relationships are improved and a synergistic relationship results. This ties managers and employees together in strategic alignment for the achievement of business goals. A Solution One of the most powerful tools a leader will ever have is communication. There is no replacement for being able to communicate well in the delegation process. Leaders must be able to communicate the "what" and the "why" of every task they delegate. Without taking the time to communicate correctly, misunderstandings occur, workloads become unbalanced, bonds are broken, processes stall, and strategic alignment with goals never occurs.

Therefore, to delegate and empower appropriately, managers and supervisors must learn the following skills:

• Explain the need for delegation.
  
• Use delegation of tasks to motivate.
  
• Explain tasks and ask team member's view (getting feedback).
  
• Specify responsibility and authority (empowerment).
  
• Confirming team member's understanding and set up time review (process improvement).
  

In a perfect world everyone is going out and empowering as is alluded to in our quote from Bill Gates; however, delegating does more than that. It develops people who are able to work through processes and make things better. Then as people develop, they move through the corporate ladder. Delegating expresses confidence in team members and motivates them to achieve strategic goals and redefine their own potential. Delegating creates your leaders of tomorrow, who already are strategically aligned with leadership and goals. What could be better than that?

The Vital Learning curriculum is designed to meet your training and budgetary needs. Want to learn more about "Delegating" or the complete Vital Learning leadership development curriculum? Available in Classroom, Online, or Blended delivery options, the Vital Learning curriculum includes the following essential topics.

• Delegating - understanding when to use delegation and how to make it motivating
• Complaints - being able to effectively manage complaints
  
• Coaching - knowing how to productively coach job skills
  
• Project Management - being able to run projects, both on-time and on-budget
  
• Conflict - understanding how to successfully resolve conflict
  
• Hiring Winning Talent- knowing what to do to consistently hire the right talent
  
• Providing Feedback - understanding how to establish performance goals and standards and give feedback
  
• And more...

For detail go to www.TheLearningEngine.org