Delegation: Why it Fails and What To Do About it !

Highly effective delegation is a powerful and absolutely learnable skill! The reason that delegation so often fails is because few people know and fully understand how to work through the four distinct stages of delegation with another person.

To get consistently high quality results, you must learn and execute the skills required in each stage, which are training, supervising, coaching and the transferring of authority. They are not hard but they are necessary.

The speed with which you can move a person from one stage to the next depends on the person’s “maturity”, that is his or her knowledge, skill, experience, willingness and ability to do so. Depending on the person, some stages take longer than others and you have to be able to recognize where the person is in his or her learning curve. It is also necessary to understand that not everyone is willing or able to move all the way to delegation in every task. To view the Delegation model click here. Acrobat reader required. Get it free at Adobe.com


Because of personality styles I find that most people are able to master one or two of the stages quite easily and naturally, while the other stages may be more difficult. This is where the failure occurs. By either misinterpreting where the person is in his or her development or by simply skipping a stage things suddenly start to fall apart. By reassessing the situation and backing up to the appropriate stage the problem can usually be resolved.

To schedule a presentation for your business organization on Delegation, call Joan at 281 293-8864 or email her. To set up a personal coaching session on delegating more effectively, call or email Joan.