Get your team involved
People in authority don’t always make the best delegators.
“They do it themselves, because they know they can do it better,” says Michael Lowenbaum, founder of The Lowenbaum Partnership LLC. “If you don’t make delegating something you are evaluating on and something you’re judging their work performance on, they’re not going to do it.”
You need your supervisors to be good delegators if you hope to build the leadership capacity in your company. If the ones in charge are doing everything, the youngsters will never learn. So you need to make it clear that it’s part of their job to train the newcomers.
“I tell them their compensation is going to be based on how they develop their staff and how they do let go of some things,” says Lowenbaum, whose law firm has 35 employees. “You may be better at it today, but in three years, both of you will be good at it if you let go a little bit.”
Lowenbaum says it’s the same as any other behavior that you want to instill in your people.
“The only way to make it so is the expectation that if they don’t do it, there will be consequences,” Lowenbaum says. “If you’re serious about it, they’ll do it.”
