Delegation - art or science?

Last week I had the opportunity to sit in on a colleague's pilot for a delegation skills course he designed. The course was interesting to me in that I am often not in the position to delegate, in the traditional sense, as my role is more of an individual contributor rather than a formal leader. Due to my lack of experience in this subject I was excited to be a part of the half-day event where I hoped to learn about a new topic but also to learn more about how the other half lives. I've felt, in my last three positions in fact, that I've operated in somewhat of a vacuum, without a team to work with or others to support me. I have worked under some people who have, at times, tasked me with work but I've been in the unique situation of creating my own work from my own developed understanding of the needs of my environment. I haven't been in that formal leadership role where I would assume the need for delegating would be automatic.

Without any background, in either delegating or having been delegated to, I was at a disadvantage when right out of the box I was put on a team tasked with creating a list of the positive outcomes that might arise should a leader delegate. My partner and I came up with a fairly comprehensive list:

• Increased productivity of the delegator by freeing up their time to accomplish other tasks
• Putting more or different minds/eyes on the problem in order to tap into their experience or expertise
• To grow staff members by giving them new or more challenging work assignments
• Reduce stress of the delegator
• To increase the trust of the team - a positive outcome would increase the ability to delegate to that person again in the future

I was feeling good about our work until I realized that the other three teams were basically creating lists detailing why someone shouldn't delegate. And their lists were far more extensive. I felt woefully inadequate, especially considering my lack of experience with this topic. What we eventually came to realize, through thoughtful instruction by my colleague, was that we should and could take advantage of delegating responsibilities if we were careful to mitigate the possible disadvantages and negative consequences of a poorly done delegation.

Through a four-step process of planning, delegating, monitoring, and reviewing we learned that planning was, as with most other aspects of life, the critical piece to any successful delegation. This was interesting to me especially as the planning piece is not one that comes as naturally to me as it might to others. I've learned quite a bit about myself in my time in my current organization (through tools such as DISC, the Listening Profile, and others) and what I've found is that my primary instinct is to drive forward through a situation, listening and react to solve a problem, rather than slowly investigating, planning and monitoring the situation to ensure a successful outcome.

While it's easy to imagine opportunities that would allow me to take advantage of these action and collaboration-oriented traits, planning for delegating and following through on the monitoring part of the process are not natural fits for me. If for nothing else, I learned that should I find myself in a situation where I could delegate a task I should first literally take a moment to thoughtfully plan the steps we would take and also to be specific in creating expectations around potential deliverable and deadlines. In the few instances where I have delegated a task, mostly with vendors or others outside of the organization, I realize I've mentally put the ball in their court and moved on, expecting they would meet my sometimes silent expectations and return the ball to me for my next step. When that expectation wasn't met it often went unnoticed for weeks or months. With this (not so new) realization I've come to see that I need to be far more blatant about my expectations, even when I'm delegating upwards - which is very uncomfortable for me. But it is only by being so concrete and forthright in the planning stage will I be "guaranteed" of success.

So, I've learned that the science of delegation can be learned, even by people like me who often move at a blistering pace, so that each opportunity will result in a successful conclusion. And with practice that science can soon turn into an art that doesn't requite forethought as it flows naturally through the tasks I delegate.

Getting Started

For months I've been considering the development of this blog as a method to collect and expand on my learning, my personal development, as I continue down this road of my new career. Having a background in education, instructional systems design and instructional technology prepared me well for making the switch to a pseudo-corporate position in a training and development role. What I've learned since making the career jump was that most training and development professionals in the corporate world don't have a background in learning or education. Although I don't have hard evidence at hand, I would feel safe in assuming most people in a T&D role come from business roles with the majority having human resources backgrounds.

So where do I fit into this picture. For the past two and a half years I believe I've brought a different perspective to my role than most. When entering into conversations with training vendors my initial reaction is to investigate the content and delivery for potential impact on the participants from a teaching and learning perspective. While most in my industry probably share that same goal I've found that they aren't coming to the conversation with the same understanding of the basics of instruction. I believe that puts me in a different position to design and evaluate training and learning opportunities for my organization.

What I find frustrating about the community that has been built around the training and development role is that there's a certain expectation that all T&D pros work within a similar set of circumstances - more in line with a corporate model than not. I'm not in a typical corporate training position where I design then deliver a single learning event to many people on a recurring basis - the industrial take on corporate training. I don't develop compliance courses, for instance, and role them out to 78,000 employees spread across the globe. I've met folks who are in those positions and I don't know how they handle all of those variables. My role is, sometimes unfortunately, more of an administrator of learning. Although I attempt to impact the delivery of our mostly vendor-delivered training I find myself often not able to make enough of an impact on the front end. The trainings we provide are often one-and-done events to small groups of highly educated and highly technical professionals with many degrees already. They are used to, and have sat through already, sometimes 25 years of school where they sit and absorb rather than learn and do. It is against this tide that I strive to make changes. And it is difficult.

As a result of this inability to impact the learning offered by our vendors on the front end what I've been trying to do, from a T&D perspective, is increase the value of these learning events by infusing them with a taste of continual learning. I've been striving to integrate our organization's e-Learning courses into our instructor-led training (ILT) in order to provide opportunities for pre/during/post course additional learning. I've been working with our participant's leadership to consider funding communities of practice connection sessions where participants from these courses can come back together some time after the course is over and discuss what they learned, how that learning impacted them and the work they do and how they've integrated that learning into their daily activities. That has been a hard sell.

Enough about my background, I'm sure more will spill out as I move forward. It is with this concentration on continual learning though that I move into the development of this blog.

The purpose of this space is for me to be able to write about my development as a professional in the field of learning, training and development. As I've hinted at, I often criticize my/our own training department's lack of continual learning opportunities and I've come to be quite tired of suffering through that myself. I, like most people, would benefit from not allowing discrete learning event stay discrete. My intention is to use this space to write about what I learn, to learn and develop more through that process, and to share my learning with the interwebs so that maybe someone else can share in that with me. And if I end up delivering my monologue to an empty theater at least I will have enjoyed the process and I will hopefully be better for it.