How To Delegate Purpose In Your Organization

In my previous piece, I shared three strategies used by two distinct organizations to help promote and support a sense of community and shared ownership in their respective workplaces – a mindset and approach that’s becoming increasingly critical for leaders to foster in order to support their organization’s adaptability and long-term success.

In this follow-up piece, I want to build on those three strategies by examining a process most leaders currently employ through their leadership and how we can better use this tactic to not only drive organizational success, but to strengthen the commitment our employees make to our shared purpose.

As the title of this piece points out, what I’m referring to here is the process of delegation.

When it comes to delegation in today’s organizations, the common tendency leaders have is to simply delegate those tasks or projects that we don’t want to do. Work that requires time and attention that we can’t be bothered to expend our limited resources on, and so we hand them off to our employees.

While this approach might help us to better manage our daily grind, the problem with this is that the act of delegation becomes a lost opportunity for us to connect what matters to our employees with what matters to our organization.

In order to improve and sustain employee morale over the long run, we need to understand what will help our employees feel like they are contributing meaningfully to our organization; that they understand the connection between their efforts and the shared purpose that defines why we do what we do.

Now this can be a challenge for many leaders because we instinctively want to make sure we maintain some form of control over things, not to mention that fear that if our employees fail, we not only have to do the work we assigned them, but we also have to address the mistakes they made.

And yet, we have to remind ourselves that our employees are not going to care about our vision if we only give them work that no one else wants to do.

So with this in mind, I’d like to discuss a strategy I’ve shared with my clients and with those who’ve attended some of my talks on how we can delegate not just tasks to our employees, but a sense of purpose and meaning, along with giving them that much-needed opportunity to learn and grow.

1. Discuss with your employee what it is you want to delegate and why
The first step in this process is one that most of us are probably already employing in our delegation process – one where we sit down with our employee to discuss the task we want to delegate to them and why.

And this is very much intentional as the goal with this strategy is not to add more to your leadership plate, but instead to help you become more effective in how you serve your organization.

That’s why when we sit down for this conversation with our employee, we need to have prepared some preliminary groundwork to identify two key aspects about our employee – first, what are their native strengths and second, how this assignment will be tied to the shared purpose of our organization.

In terms of understanding what our employee’s native strengths are, this means that we’re looking beyond the surface of those tasks they perform well, to identifying those tasks that strengthen their internal motivation to push themselves to be better; to become a stronger contributor to your organizational community and shared purpose.

Being able to distinguish the difference between what your employees are good at and what internally strengthens them is critical to your ability to keep them engaged and invested over the long run.

The second element that we need to have in place is to be able to provide a clear line connecting what it is we’d like to delegate, and the overarching goals that will define our collective successes.

In planning what tasks or responsibilities we want to delegate to our employees, it’s important that we’re able to demonstrate how this new assignment ties into that drive we all have to know that what we do matters; that we can feel a sense of ownership not only in the work we do, but in the collective vision that defines why we do what we do.

By having these two insights at hand when you begin this conversation of what you want to delegate to your employee, it will become clear to them that this isn’t about handing out work simply to get things done. Rather, your focus is on helping them become stronger contributors to your organization’s shared purpose and with it, creating a sense of value and purpose for your employee.

2. Create a roadmap for how this work will be delegated over time
Once we’ve created the groundwork that will ensure that we’re delegating more than just menial tasks, but a sense of purpose in the work our employees do, the next step is to begin a dialogue with our employee about the delegation process.

What this means is that we can’t simply have a one-off conversation with our employee where we inform them of the assignment we want to delegate to them and then simply leave them on their own to figure out how to go about completing this work. Rather, what we need to do in this initial conversation is define and create a roadmap for how we will hand-off this responsibility to our employee over time.

Remember that one of the common reasons why many leaders resort to delegating menial or low-level tasks to their employees is due to that understandable fear that if their employee fails in this role, not only will that reflect poorly on our leadership, but we will also be responsible for cleaning up the mess they made and doing the work we gave them to do in the first place.

And that’s why we have to view delegation not as a single, insular conversation, but an on-going dialogue we have with our employees where we regularly check in on their progress. This will also help our employees to know that they can come to us for guidance and support to help them better learn the ropes and understand how they can overcome the inevitable setbacks they’ll encounter as they learn how to succeed in this new function.

3. Remind employees of the added value they now bring to your organization
In most cases of delegation, this is pretty much the point at which we remove ourselves from the process and begin shifting our focus to other matters.

However, if our goal now is to ensure that we are in fact delegating a sense of purpose to our employees – to truly engage them in the work they do and in the shared purpose that defines our organization – then we need to make sure that we’re consistently reminding them of the value they’re now able to bring to our organization.

Sharing this brief message with our employees will not only help to keep them motivated in pushing themselves to master these new initiatives we’ve assigned to them, but it will also encourage them to discover new opportunities that they could explore to continue their growth as valued members of our organization.

It’s also important to remember here that the value proposition behind this effort is not reserved solely for your employees, or even for your organization. As a leader, you yourself gain from this process not only because you’re helping to empower your employees to become stronger contributors to your organization, but because your employees are helping you by taking tasks off your plate.

That’s why it important that we have these brief conversations with our employees – so we can remind ourselves that one of the end goals of this process is being freed from this task so we can shift our attention to other areas that require our time and energy.

Granted, in light of the way most leaders approach delegation, the strategy described above can seem like a lot of work and certainly more demanding on us in terms of what opportunities we’re providing to our employees.

And yet, the reality is that leadership has never been about taking the easy path, but about how we can help those around us to succeed. And this leadership truth is becoming more and more apparent for today’s leaders as they face the numerous challenges that continue to present themselves in today’s faster paced, interconnected global economy.

That’s why we can’t afford to continue to use delegation as a means to hand off those tasks and responsibilities we have no interest in doing. Rather, we need to use delegation as the tool it’s meant to be – as a means to engage our employees in work that matters and which helps them – and consequently, our organization – to succeed and thrive in the years ahead.