Know the difference between empowering, delegating

I’ve written before about the importance of knowing your limits. As the head of an organization, we need to be aware of how our company is running, but that doesn’t mean we need to do it all. Accepting that we don’t know everything and trusting others to share the load are important attributes of a leader.

That’s where delegation comes in. Each employee plays an important role in the success of the company – so long as responsibilities are distributed based on individual strengths and the value we create. However, there are effective ways to disperse tasks and responsibilities that create employee buy-in.

Leadership development specialist Julia Felton explains that “there is a spectrum to delegation.”

“At the end of the spectrum are task-based activities that team members are asked to perform, with little understanding of the context of that task; whilst at the other end of the spectrum, delegation becomes empowerment that ultimately morphs into Shared Leadership,” she writes.

 

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