Delegation

“Successful delegation of authority as a leadership style takes time and energy, but it's worth the time and energy to help employee involvement and employee empowerment succeed as a leadership style. It's worth the time and energy to help First let me preface this by explaining what my organization does. We manufacture disposable food service/ tableware products. We have six levels of management. At the top is the owner; next are the executive committee, upper management, mid-managers, front line supervisors, team leaders, and hourly workers. Being a manufacturer delegation is ingrained into the system, no one person could do everything. Everyone has a section delegated to them and all the pieces must work together to produce the end product.

The work is delegated when orders for product are received. The plant manager (upper management group) delegates the scheduling of the orders to the production scheduler (mid manager). These schedules are relayed to the front line supervisors. They in turn assign hourly workers to team leaders. The team leaders assign workers to particular machines and the orders are filled. There are also support personnel, warehouse personnel who supply the machines with raw material and packaging material. There are also maintenance personnel that provide support for the equipment. This work is always delegated starting with the maintenance manager (mid-manager), to the front line supervisors, to the team leaders, to the workers. The delegation is the same for the warehouse personnel except it starts with the warehouse manager (mid-manager).

The process also involves the engineering team (mid-managers). The engineers decide what tooling to use in which machine and delegate the work of change over to the front line maintenance supervisors. Then they in turn delegate the work to the maintenance team leader, and he delegates to his team. Although all team leaders are hands-on workers in all departments. Most of the time it is hard to tell the difference between the team leaders and the hourly workers except, at the end of the day, the team leaders make the decisions and are responsible to the supervisors.

One of the best examples of delegation occurs when a total rebuild of a machine is required. The front line supervisors are tasked with the project but without them delegating 90% of the work to the team leaders and in turn the team leads delegating work to the employees the deadlines would never be met.

Effective delegation requires one be organized. I think this is the most important of the skills required. Because, if one is not organized one cannot quantify and identify the body of work set before one, this makes it impossible to delegate. This situation will frustrate the manager trying to delegate, lower the morale of his team and disturb the managers above him or her. This will undoubtedly be a career limiting condition. Another skill needed is the ability to rank peoples skills. This is important in delegating to make sure one matches the person to the task. This will lower the possibility of failure and lesser morale of the employee.

People need to feel a sense of accomplishment and successfully completing a task accompanied by praise is a huge morale boost. Effective delegation needs effective communication on the part of both parties. The supervisor needs the skills to articulate the expectations in different forms, written, verbal, and graphically. The person receiving the work needs to be able to understand what is being asked of him to do. Heathfield (2006), a prominent human resource professional states that,

employees succeed, develop and meet your expectations. You