Do you suffer from a martyr syndrome? You know what I mean. You never take time off, and you don’t delegate tasks because you don’t think your employees can handle the extra workload. Even worse, you might think they’re not capable of working at a higher level. It’s easy to imagine that the organization will fall apart without you. In truth, the success of your department could be at risk because of your inability to properly delegate tasks, which would lead to better reasons for promotion.

The Art of Delegating and Reasons for Promotion

Don’t wait until the day before you go on vacation to attempt to train an employee on a complex task. Ideally, you’ll want them to complete the task, especially if it’s routine, at least once before you are away from work for a while. Doing so gives them the opportunity to encounter unexpected events and to ask you for help. Having completed the task once successfully means they’ll feel more confident.

Be Specific

Tamera Loerzel, a career coach cited in the Journal of Accountancy, advises supervisors to avoid “being too vague in your requests.” When you ask an employee to keep an eye on the CRM system while you’re away, they may think you want them to report any system outages to the IT staff. In reality, you may be expecting them to watch for incomplete entries and to talk with reps who don’t enter their activity on a daily basis. During your conversations when delegating a task, explain what you do each day. Let them know how long they should plan to spend on the activity. And give them a heads up about the problems you typically encounter and how you handle them. Yes, all of this explanation will take time on your part. You may even have to write down a bit of documentation for the employee to refer to in your absence. That’s all part of the training process and eventually leads to good reasons for promotion.

Matching Tasks to Employee Interest and Skill Level

Investing time now to delegate tasks to employees will pay off in the future. The employee tasked with the responsibility will feel honored that you have confidence in them. These days, at least 28% of sales reps report having left an organization because they didn’t see any reasons for promotion in their future. When you delegate tasks to employees, you’re grooming them to move up or over in the organization. Today’s highly skilled workers enjoying handling a variety of tasks and want to do work that makes a difference.

You can increase the payoff by matching specific tasks to employee interests and skills. Before you start training an employee on handling a responsibility, such as preparing a sales pipeline report for senior management, think about how they learn best. You can gain insight into their learning process by asking them to take a psychometric assessment. By reviewing the assessment results, you’ll learn whether your employee needs plenty of reassurance and cajoling or whether they’ll quickly pick up a task and prefer to work through problems alone.

Be Available and Positive

Working through a new task for the first time may stress out some employees. If you’ve structured the assignment properly and believe your employee can do the work, don’t forget to provide support and reassurance during the process. Let them know they can come to you with any questions. Be available to them and praise what they’ve done right in finishing the task. Your job is not to ensure that they’ll do the job exactly as you would, but to verify that the results are satisfactory and that your team member feels successful. This kind of delegating leads to better reasons for promotion in your organization.

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