Why Aren’t I Delegating More?

by Rik Nemanick, PhD

In all of the work I have done coaching executives, one of the most common topics that consistently comes up is delegation. The topic is not confined to first-time leaders. Plenty of vice presidents and chief financial officers find themselves performing tasks that they should turn over to their subordinates. Most of them don’t question why they are doing these tasks or who should be performing them instead.

In my Harvard Business Review piece entitled A Data-Based Approach to Delegating, I share a method leaders can use a classic time log to identify tasks that they could or should delegate. What I didn’t have room to explore in the piece was the reasons why leaders find themselves performing these tasks. Below are some of these reasons:

• Carry-over tasks: These tasks get carried over from your prior job (like when Mike in the article was promoted from controller to CFO). You intend to delegate it, but haven’t done so yet.
• Inherited tasks: Some tasks you do because your predecessor did them and you didn’t question why (or whether) you should do them.
• Struggling subordinates: Other tasks are ones that a subordinate wasn’t doing very well, so you took it over, intending to give it back or moving the responsibility to someone else at some point.
• Supportive boss: I have also had executives who see how busy their teams are and want to roll up their sleeves and help out in the short term, but end up reabsorbing those tasks permanently.
• Inexperienced subordinates: Further, especially for the could delegate tasks, you may not have anyone on your team who you feel has enough skills or experience to do the task leading to you keeping it.
• High standards: Finally, there are tasks that you like doing or that you are good at and don’t trust anyone else to do them as well as you. Regardless of how these tasks got on your list, the key is to recognize that you need to find them a better home than your desk.

If you try out my time log approach, you might recognize how you have ended up with these tasks on your plate. Let me know what tasks you discover that you should delegate and how you delegated them to someone else.