By: Dr. Sanjay Kumar Agarwal, Sr. Associate Editor, ICN Group
(In last article, we knew about whom to delegate. Today we will know why people do not delegate.)
Why people do not delegate?
There are various reasons, why people don’t delegate. The biggest reason is that they don’t know what to delegate and whom to delegate. They think that only they can do it in best manner. Sometimes, they are afraid of losing control over the work. Some people think that they are indispensable due to the fact that they are doing this particular task in most effective manner and if the task is delegated to somebody else and he succeeds, they will lose their value in the eyes of the organisation.
However, you should remember that you should not indulge yourself in over delegating. It is shirking of responsibility and it may result into diminishing your value in the eyes of your organisation and may also cost you much desired motivation. You should also be careful about delegating the works amongst your subordinates according to their capabilities. If you indulge in reckless delegation, it will not fetch you desired results and the productivity of your team will be reduced.
One more thing you should remember is that you should keep a track of delegated task, specially important tasks. I share here an example from my real life when I was working with Government of India in the Ministry of Finance. In our office, the Commissioner used to head a staff of about 300-400 officers and used to receive more than 100 letters per day. Obviously, he is not required to attend & reply each & every letter himself. After all, he is having a big office under his control for doing this work. So, he marks the incoming letters to different sections, but he cannot keep track of all the letters. What he does is that he marks ‘Special Watch’ on important letters and puts a date besides it. This means that he would like to know the outcome of this letter/ direction latest by that date. When his personal assistant used to distribute the marked letters to different branches, he enters these ‘Special Watch’ letters in a separate register titled ‘Special Watch Register’, which is maintained datewise according to the date of special watch. Now it is his job to see the register datewise and before one or two days of deadline, he used to remind the section to which the said letter was sent, that there is still no feedback about the letter.
You will notice that it is a very effective way of keeping track of important letters or tasks assigned to anybody else and can be followed in any organisation. Remember, you have to just ‘delegate’, not ‘abdicate’ the work. There is one more benefit of adopting this practice. I used to observe in my office that whenever in my branch, we received any letter marked with ‘special watch’, we ourselves tried to accord top priority to this work and honour the deadline, as we always knew that the head of the office is personally monitoring outcome of this correspondence.
(In the next article, I will discuss about the steps in delegation. I believe that you are enjoying the journey towards the future of your dreams with me. If yes, please stay tuned. Happy G.O.P.T.A.)
Dr. Sanjay Kumar Agarwal, Creator & copyright holder of the concept G.O.P.T.A.© is an Author, Certified NLP Lifestyle Trainer, Strategic Interventionist, Corporate Trainer & Motivational Speaker ( http://bit.ly/Signature-Workshops-Sanjay-Kumar-Agarwal ) and recipient of Honorary Doctorate of Excellence (Management) by prestigious Young Scientist University, California, USA. He is Founder of ‘Read, Learn & Earn Movement’ and is popularly known among his fans & followers across the globe as ‘Time and Goal Guru’.
