The head of the company can independently manage the sales department, technical maintenance of the company, personally communicate with customers. True, then its effectiveness, as a boss, will tend to zero. Why? Because it is impossible to be the best in everything, and the task of a competent leader is to properly delegate authority. What does this mean? How to delegate correctly? More on this later in the article.
Explanation of the concept
To delegate means to delegate part of the authority vested in the manager to his subordinates so that the latter fulfill the necessary task.
In fact, this is providing part of the functions to people who were not originally endowed with them, in order to achieve a specific goal. What guides competent managers in delegating rights? Of course, job description.
The leader needs to delegate authority, primarily in order to cope with other, more urgent tasks. It is important to note that it is impractical to give part of the functions to subordinates in a small company, but in a large enterprise it is simply necessary, otherwise it will not work out effectively. Each manager must understand when delegation of rights takes place, and when it is better to do everything yourself.
An example of delegation of authority is the existence of a bank lending department. Loans are money that belongs to the bank and its owners. Owners give part of their authority (the ability to manage their money in the most profitable way) to the credit department. Specialists of the latter themselves determine who to give money at interest. Bank managers have more free time to think over the concept of development, and not to do routine business.
The delegation of rights is necessary so that each employee can fulfill his task, thereby achieving the goals necessary for the development of the company in the end.
Types of Authority
In delegation theory, several types of authority are distinguished. To understand this concept, you need to familiarize yourself with these types.
- Linear This is the authority that a manager gives to his subordinates.
- Headquarters. If linear powers are, more simply, the vertical of submission, then staff powers are horizontal. The latter involve receiving recommendations from more experienced managers to control linear authority.
Depending on the amount of authority that management delegates to its employees, there are two types of government:
- Centralized. The goals and ways to achieve them are determined by the senior management.
- Decentralized. Goals are determined by the authorities, employees choose their own paths of achievement. Here, the ability to use delegated authority is fully disclosed.
It is logical that a centralized approach is used where creativity is required to a lesser extent, the opposite situation is relevant for a decentralized management method.
Why is delegation necessary in particular?
Delegation of rights has at least three critical goals:
- Removing ineffective work from managers. Business is partly creativity. The less routine the manual does, the more time it can devote to tasks that require an original approach.
- Improving the efficiency of the departments of the company as a whole.
- Increasing employee motivation: thanks to delegation, each employee is interested in the implementation of the task. His wages and career growth depend on this.
Despite the difference in the goals described above, the achievement of each of them is very important for the successful development of the company. It is much easier to manage the situation as a whole, if at the same time there is no need to perform some small tasks.
The most important rule that effective managers absolutely always adhere to is that the manager cannot directly participate in production, otherwise he will turn from manager to worker.
It is thanks to this position that there is a division into a management segment and a working segment. There is nothing shameful or insulting in this, everyone is only doing his own thing.
A typical example of the transfer of part of the functions from the management to subordinates is the delegation of workflow rights: paperwork, signature, transfer to others.
It is worth saying a few words about the third goal described above. If an employee has additional powers to perform a particular task, then he also begins to feel like a leader, albeit small, but still.
Many people like to feel responsible for something (it is these individuals who need to delegate powers to a greater extent). From this, a person’s interest in achieving a goal increases, a creative approach is applied, and work efficiency is increased.
Principles of Delegation
The delegation of rights and obligations is part of management, and each component of this management science has its own principles of implementation. Accordingly, the delegation also has several practical features that will help to implement this process so as to increase the efficiency of the company by 30% or even 40%. They will be described later.
It is important to note that compliance with all the principles described below will avoid many organizational problems, which will require a lot of effort and time to solve.
One-man management
The essence of this principle is that each subordinate should have only one immediate supervisor. Thus, all workers will work to achieve only the goal that their direct bosses have set for them. It is difficult to say something good about a department in which several people can assign responsibilities to one person at once. Whose task is priority? Where to find the time to complete them all? Finding answers to these questions is not so simple.
Restriction. Rights and obligations
This principle follows from the principle of unity of command. It says that each boss has a strictly limited number of employees who he can give orders to. This eliminates the situation where the head may interrupt the work of employees of other departments so that they temporarily become subordinate to him.
An effective manager, when transferring part of the authority to his employee, will not entrust him with tasks more than what is required by the job description, which was discussed above.
Responsibility
Firstly, every leader, even if he gave part of his functions to employees, is still responsible for the actions of subordinates. The delegation of the rights and powers of responsibility of the head does not exclude.
Secondly, the transfer of authority is necessary only to those individuals who precisely cope (with greater probability than the others) with the task. Naturally, no one gives an absolute guarantee of a positive result, but you need to strive for this.
Reporting
All employees who have access to functions that were not originally intended for them should report to the immediate supervisor about deviations in the performance of the task. So the leader will be able to make corrective decisions in the process of achieving the goal, and the work will not stop.
How to properly delegate and what can not be trusted subordinates?
In order to correctly delegate rights and authorities, it is worth following the following tips:
- you can not concentrate power in one place, you need to delegate, but know the measure. The work of the company becomes more effective if competent employees receive part of the necessary functions additionally;
- it is not necessary to delegate only in order to offload the head, if this does not bring benefit to the company, but only gives a couple of hours of free time to the head;
- Do not additionally burden an employee who is already too busy with work. As a result, he may not be able to cope with both basic and additional responsibilities;
- when delegating authority, it is always worth considering that the task may not be completed, and have for this a backup plan of action that will correct the situation.
Once again, it is necessary to remind about the delegation of rights and responsibility for this: for the actions of the employee to whom they delegated authority, his immediate supervisor is always responsible. If the former makes a mistake, the higher management will ask from the latter.
There is also a list of tasks that it is better not to delegate to subordinates, so as not to acquire more problems. It includes:
- determination of the general goal of the company;
- making decisions that can fundamentally affect the development of the company;
- monitoring of overall results;
- tasks associated with a huge risk for the further functioning of the company;
- urgent tasks, the result of which cannot be fixed in a short time.
Why can not you trust the control of results to subordinates? Because this is the main task of the boss. Of course, we are talking about general control, private control is already carried out locally by the employees themselves, who are responsible for the implementation of the task.
A few words should be said about the implementation of tasks that are associated with great risk for the company. Such goals, of course, can be set for subordinates, but then you need to have confidence about these people, to know that they certainly will not fail. As a rule, the presence of such employees in the state is a rarity and luck, but you cannot rely on luck in business.
In fact, urgent tasks - these are the tasks associated with great risk. Of course, their failure may not paralyze the work of the company, but it will certainly cause a lot of problems to the entire staff of the company, since it will take all the available resources to resolve the problems caused.
Signature of documents
Regarding the delegation of the right to sign documents? An important question that is relevant for most managers: “Can subordinates for the head sign documents and is it worth delegating this authority to them?”
It is worthwhile to understand the delegation of signature rights in more detail.
Again, it all depends on the situation: when the amount of documentation that needs to be constantly signed is too large, you can entrust this work to your subordinates. The main thing is that they do not abuse this opportunity and do not sign any extra document that can cause a lot of problems to the boss.
So that an employee can sign for his boss, you need to issue an appropriate order on the delegation of signature rights. Only in this case, it is possible to entrust the signature of documents to employees without problems with the law.
The model order on the delegation of signature rights contains the name of the organization in which the order is issued, the internal number of the document, the date, name, text (must contain the word “I ORDER”) with the description of the authority granted, the signature and decryption of the official, as well as the employee to whom he is intended .
In fact, this document has a standard form that can be found on the Web.
Total
It should be abstracted to outline all the provisions described in this article regarding delegation of authority:
- delegation is the transfer of rights and certain responsibilities to others in order to achieve the goal;
- delegation of authority can be linear (from boss to employee) and staff (from one boss to another);
- There are two types of management: centralized (does not require a creative approach and wide delegation of authority) and decentralized (the opposite of the first);
- delegation is necessary in order to remove the unnecessary burden from management, increase the efficiency of the functioning of individual company structures, and increase employee interest in achieving the general goal of the company;
- delegation is based on five principles: unity of command, limitation, rights and obligations, responsibility, reporting;
- the sample order on the delegation of signature rights has a standard form, which is freely available on the Web;
- you need to delegate wisely; for this, several recommendations are highlighted in the article.
You should always remember that a good manager will never delegate authority to his subordinates only because of the desire to quickly get rid of a large number of tasks. You can’t rush into the issue of delegation. As it is impossible to endow the functions of employees, if it does not bring any benefit to the company.
Any action (not only delegation of authority) that is performed by each employee, including the manager of the company, and the head of any department, should be aimed at the benefit of the organization: to increase work efficiency or profit, for example. A company in which employees have learned this rule will develop successfully.