Time Management - Marc Mancini
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How to Delegate Effectively 75<br />
Communication Skills<br />
When you need to delegate a task, good communication<br />
skills are vital—not only tact and sensitivity, but also the<br />
ability to specify exactly what you’re asking the other person to do.<br />
Here are some of the most common skills displayed by good communicators:<br />
• They make eye contact.<br />
• They treat people with respect.<br />
• They listen as carefully as they speak.<br />
• They organize their thoughts before they speak.<br />
• They avoid using unnecessary jargon or technical terms.<br />
• They don’t assume.<br />
• They encourage questions.<br />
• They ask for feedback.<br />
• They avoid speaking when they’re angry.<br />
Good communication skills are essential to effective delegation,<br />
because miscommunication can result in poor performance or resentment.<br />
Delegating poorly leads almost invariably to disappointment,<br />
frustration, inefficiency, and, often, failure. Then, the manager<br />
may blame the person to whom he or she delegated the task,<br />
causing bad feelings, and not improve the way he or she delegates,<br />
so the delegation problems continue, in a downward spiral.<br />
Failure may also serve to reinforce all the delegation blocks<br />
listed earlier.<br />
Here are 12 steps for masterful delegation:<br />
1. Identify the task to be delegated. Once you’ve freed your<br />
mind from thoughts that defeat delegation, this step should<br />
become the easiest of all.<br />
2. Trace out, on paper, the assigned project’s flow. If the task<br />
is simple, this should be easy. If it’s complicated, you may<br />
need to deploy a system similar to that described in Chapter<br />
4. As an added help to you, the necessary steps of delegation<br />
are flowcharted in Figure 6-2.<br />
If you assign work to a number of employees (either as part<br />
of a team project or each working on something different), be