How to Delegate Tasks Successfully

I just wanted to share with you a couple of really practical examples of how you might do something like this. So one of the things we talk quite a lot about, certainly when we’re training leaders and managers, is how to delegate successfully. And there's many steps in which to do, that but one of the things we don't often think about is actually ‘who do we delegate to?’ And for most of us, as leaders, we have that person who always gets it right and we find ourselves being drawn to delegating there. Or that person we can rely on, or maybe that person who feels like they are up and coming, and they're really motivated, and they’d surely be right for it? But actually one of the things that I've been doing over the last year is delegating a task to the team, and letting the team decide who does it. So that's a really simple thing to do, you set the framework, you say what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by, to what you're looking for as the outcomes, and then you just wait to hear who the team have nominated to actually do the work. That's one really great thing that’s made a huge difference in our team. One of the other things that we've been doing at Happy, which has been hugely successful, is many of us spend too much time worrying about job descriptions; when you have this job title you should be doing these tasks. And instead of looking at it like that, we look instead: if you work in this team as a team you need to deliver on these tasks, and as a team you need to decide who is good at what, and therefore who should do which task. As Maureen said in the intro : for me, my aim is to have the teams at Happy be doing 80% of their job that gives them joy. And the only way to do that, is to make sure they are working to their strengths; that they are doing the things that get them up in the morning, that motivate them, that make them want to give you the extra mile. That's how we multiply peoples smarts. It's not by working them harder, because actually when you work to your strengths it's effortless, it’s stress-free.