I posted previously on the importance of knowing what delegating tasks is intended to achieve, rather than delegating for the sake of delegating.
For example, delegation may enable you to go win more work, work on more lucrative files or to get home and see the kids.
Let me share with you how I got this wrong.
Before coming back round to management consultancy, I was on the Executive Leadership Team for a large law firm.
Let's call that firm Dentons, because that's who it was. 🙂
I had a directorate of ~40 people covering some pretty exciting areas; Practice Management, Commercial Finance, Legal Project Management and Innovation.
All killer, no filler.
And my team was great - I enjoyed working with all of my direct and indirect reports, at both a personal and a professional level.
And they were doing great things - they were repricing strategic accounts, reshaping entire practice groups, supporting lateral hires, rolling out GenAI - you name it, if it was strategic and exciting my guys and gals were on it.
And they were on it.
Beyond securing resource and budget, some alignment between teams and the odd (small) fire, I didn't have to get all that involved in the detail.
So where did I go wrong?
Well I didn't think about what I would be doing with the time I'd freed up through all this delegation.
I realised pretty quickly that I had replaced all the stuff I like doing (exciting projects, making an impact) with stuff I don't like doing (meetings and emails).
So now I don't have a team of 40, I don't have a PA, and delegation is limited to outsourcing certain tasks to specialists.
But the flip side of this is that I've now traded a whole bunch of internal meetings and emails for exciting projects, making an impact directly with clients.
And I love it.
So don't do what I did. Don't rush out and recruit a bunch of people. Don't delegate away all the things you like doing.
Get clarity on what you want to achieve with the time you have, and then work out if delegation helps you achieve this.
In many cases the answer will be yes but, as my experience tells me, not always.
What do you think? Join the conversation on LinkedIn
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