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I know the MT guidance on feedback, over assignment and delegation: but how can I delegate to busy directs without compromising quality too much? I have increasingly little time and need to make hard choices I think...

 

 

donm's picture
Training Badge

Of course someone with more experience doing the job will do it better, so the quality of your work is better than someone who has just started doing the task...

... until that person gets more experience. I have yet to figure out a way to have someone get more experience except by doing the task. You're just going to have to take the mistakes and the do-overs until the person gets better at it. Then you'll go on to the next delegation of a task and continue the process with occasional dips in quality, but overall performance improvement over time.

leanne's picture
Licensee Badge

Add a you-review step in before whatever is released out into the world, as it were.

When I take something over from my manager (er, that is, when something is delegated to me), I make sure to send it to them directly a day or two before it's due. The first time or two I expect them to go through the whole thing (if it's a written report, anyway - numbers they can look at the bottom line). After that, I highlight some sections I'm concerned about and tell them to read those specifically. (They know that what I mean is 'I don't care what else you read but I *really* *really* *want* you to confirm I've written this right'. I usually say that in the email.)

When they have corrections, usually they make the corrections themselves and then send it forward. I ask them to always shoot me a copy of the corrections too. Then I'll read the corrections, compare it to what I originally sent, and (if they don't have time to explain to me what I did wrong, anyway) try to deduce what to do better next time. For instance, I sent a status report to my manager, and she always reformatted it into a slightly different format before sending it on. I finally got her to send me the real format she sent on. Since then, I send my original report in that format. She still sometimes rewrites things, but she doesn't have to spend the time reformatting.

For much of what I've taken over, they still feel they need to be the one to send it on - in some cases because it's required to come from the manager, period, in some cases because I don't have access to the system it's supposed to go to, etc, so I would have to go through them to get it out into the world anyway. I don't really recommend that unless there's a real good reason for it (like, only managers have access to the system it goes into), simply because it means you still have to *always* handle it even years later.