Can you delegate in your remote team?
Delegation is an essential part of leadership. Without delegation, it can prove challenging to manage a series of projects and ensure they are completed on time and on target with what a client wants.
As a leader with remote workers and remote team members, you might wonder about the viability of delegating tasks and therefore some of your authority and responsibility to professionals in other countries and time zones, especially if they’re freelancers or contractors.
Why delegation is essential for leaders?
Once any project is large enough that you personally can’t manage every moving part, delegating tasks to senior members of a remote team becomes an operational necessity.
Trust is an essential element of this. And it works both ways. You need to trust in your skills as a manager to delegate effectively, and then trust in those who are taking on more responsibility to implement your goals and aims.
Communication makes delegation and remote team management possible. In many cases, unless you’ve worked with a remote team for years and know, trust and understand one another completely, over communicating is a recommended approach. Managers and co-founders of numerous successful remote startups, such as Buffer and Zapier, recommend communicating maybe more than necessary providing longer, clearer explanations to avoid confusion and create clarity.
The process of delegation
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Identify the tasks you want to delegate
The first step to delegating effectively is deciding which tasks and responsibilities you want to assign to someone else on your team. Take a look at the work you currently have on your plate, and ask yourself: which of these is totally necessary for me to do, and which could be done better by someone else?
Aside from that, you should also consider time constraints. Do you really have time to do all these tasks? Be totally honest about your current workload. Will you potentially miss crucial deadlines if you do them by yourself? The purpose of delegation is to maintain a smooth workflow and prevent yourself from being overworked, so keep these in mind before you even think about what to delegate.
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Delegate with trust and fairness
Now, you need to start assigning tasks to your team. And when you do, don’t forget to include your full trust in their capability to take each task on. There’s no point in delegating if you’re intending to check on them every half an hour to see if they’re doing it the way you want it to. Micromanagement won’t do either of you any good.
From the beginning, make your expectations crystal clear and let them know the details of what you’d consider a high-quality output from them. If they fail to meet your expectations, use this as an opportunity to re-align on what outcome you were hoping to get out of the task and make sure they understand that you’re counting on them to do better next time. It’s your responsibility as a manager to make your team feel trusted, supported, and that you believe in them.
Delegation plays a major role in all successful web development business in both saving time and money. And it is equally important to rule out your doubts on remote teams that can help you.
However, you should do proper research on the team that you are considering delegating tasks to; don’t take this as a hassle; it’s rather a small investment for a greater cause. We all have the same goal, to increase our ROI; and delegation plays a big part in helping us grow.
