Effective management of delegated tasks is a powerful lever for optimizing your productivity and enabling your team to develop their skills. It involves reallocating activities that are best suited to the workflow, priorities and skills of other team members.
Delegating doesn’t mean getting rid of what you don’t want to deal with, or giving up control, but rather taking a strategic approach to managing your workload.
Why delegate?
Delegation is important for several reasons:
- Optimized productivity: frees up your time to concentrate on high value-added tasks.
- Team skills development: It offers your team members the opportunity to get involved in interesting projects, develop new strengths and enhance their skills.
- Stress reduction and burnout prevention: It reduces your mental workload by relieving you of repetitive or tedious tasks, and combats overwork.
- Improved quality: Entrusting specific assignments to experts can guarantee superior quality work.
- Commitment and transparency: Communicating the reason for delegation fosters commitment and transparency.
What to delegate (the 6T method and concrete examples)
Not everything can be delegated, especially strategic or essential work that requires your attention. However, many tasks can be entrusted to others:
The 6T method is particularly effective for identifying tasks to be delegated:
- Tiny tasks: Simple, repetitive activities, such as sorting e-mails or managing your diary.
- Tedious : Boring or monotonous tasks, such as data entry or database updates.
- Time-consuming: Time-consuming tasks such as planning trips, managing social networks or searching for information.
- Teachable: Tasks that you can easily explain to someone else, such as writing standardized reports.
- Terrible at (limited skills): Activities for which you lack expertise, such as accounting or website management.
- Time-sensitive (urgent): Tasks requiring rapid action, such as customer follow-ups or crisis management.
You can also delegate recurring tasks, activities in which a team member has expressed an interest in honing a skill, or tasks that contribute to your employees’ professional goals.
How to delegate effectively (10 rules for success)
Here are 10 practical tips to ensure that your delegation is a success:
- Be patient: The first few times will take longer. Don’t give up until your partner understands how you work.
- Don’t delegate everything: You remain in control, and certain tasks are your sole responsibility (for example, contacting a tax authority in a different country, or defining the customer message).
- Surround yourself with the right people: Look for competence, professionalism, trust and loyalty. Delegate to resources who have mastered a skill, even if their price is higher, because it’s more productive and economical in the long term.
- Communicate and explain why you delegate: This promotes commitment and transparency within the team.
- Be precise: Give clear, detailed instructions. Vague instructions lead to approximate results. Explain the context, documents, tools, priority, objectives, expectations and expected results.
- Learn to train to better delegate: Don’t just “pass the buck”. Make sure that the resources involved have the necessary information. Use the “Watch me do it, let’s do it together, now try to do it yourself” method. Consider training as an investment that will pay off. Let employees solve their own problems with guidance.
- Keep in touch with your team: respond to their requests and organize regular follow-ups. Even responding to these requests will save you time.
- Don’t try to manage everything, really delegate: Once the process has begun, trust your collaborators. Let things happen while keeping an eye on the execution, and don’t try to supplant them. Focus on the end results, not on the exact method of execution.
- Comment and give feedback: Give positive, constructive feedback. Help your team to improve. Ask for their feedback to help you improve your delegation.
- Say thank you: Recognition is essential and will engage your team even more. Be sure to give credit where credit is due when the job is done.
Recommended tools for managing delegated tasks
The right delegation software revolutionizes the way teams collaborate and communicate, simplifying communication and ensuring a smooth flow of tasks. When choosing software, look for features such as an intuitive user interface, collaboration tools, task tracking, integration capabilities, mobile accessibility, reporting and analysis, and good customer service.
Here’s a list of tools that can help you manage delegated tasks effectively:
1. Kiwili
Kiwili is an all-in-one business management software package, including invoicing, quotations, accounting, CRM, project management and time management.
Key features for delegation: Allows you to distribute tasks between collaborators, interact on a task to exchange ideas, and track the exact progress of delegated tasks. It includes time and task management functionalities.
Limitations : Designed for medium-sized companies.
2. ClickUp
All-in-one project management software, with over 15 ways to visualize workflows.
Key delegation features: Facilitates delegation and tracking of task progress. Allows you to organize, assign, prioritize, manage and track individual and global tasks and sub-tasks. Provides customizable dashboards to assess team capacity and track activities. Features over 100 pre-built automations and over 1,000 integrations. Possibility of converting comments into individual tasks.
Limitations: Can be difficult to use for beginners.
3. Todoist
Popular task and project management software, simple and accessible, popular with individual users.
Key delegation features: Enable seamless task delegation and progress tracking. You can schedule reminders, prioritize tasks with 4 color levels, share tasks via e-mail and centralize discussions in comments. Receive real-time notifications. Access to over 80 integrations.
Limitations: Limited capabilities for managing complex projects and tasks, lack of features such as Gantt charts or Kanban boards.
4. ProofHub
Task and operations management tool for effective team collaboration.
Key delegation features: Make it easy to delegate tasks and track team members’ progress. You can define clear parameters, create task assignments and subtasks, and get real-time progress reports. Offers four unique task views and management of dependencies between tasks.
Limitations: Limited integrations and only paid packages available.
5. MeisterTask
Designed for agile teams, with an intuitive interface and customizable tables for project tracking.
Key delegation features: Enables better prioritization of tasks, and the ability to add team members as project observers and assign tasks directly to them. Serves as a central communication hub and offers time-tracking features.
Limitations: Limited reporting capabilities.
6. BIGContacts
Primarily a CRM, it also offers task management functions.
Key features for delegation: Provides a centralized platform for tasks, intelligent reporting to monitor work efficiency, and lets you create customized workflows with drag-and-drop functionality. Easily assign and track tasks, and automate task and reminder management.
Limitations: Some users have reported limited functionality and system slowness.
7. HubSpot task management
Simple, easy-to-use task management solution.
Key delegation features: Assign tasks and receive notifications of updates. Integrates with hundreds of applications and platforms, and enables communication via internal team discussion.
Limitations: Templates and reporting features could be improved.
8. Chanty
A collaboration tool to help manage tasks, including messaging and videoconferencing.
Key delegation features: Turn any message into a task, set due dates and assign tasks. Features a Kanban Board function for better visualization.
Limitations: Doesn’t manage subtasks and lacks calendar customization.
9. Notion
Task management software that adapts to your working style, allowing you to create a task management dashboard for a complete view.
Key delegation features: Sort tasks by priority, schedule and category. Access to calendars, Kanban boards, Gantt charts and task lists.
Limitations: Steep learning curve and limited customization capabilities.
10. ProProfs Project
Good software for managing, prioritizing and delegating tasks.
Key delegation features: Track tasks, create customized workflows and assign tasks according to capacity. Visualize tasks with Gantt charts. Provides AI-powered reports for information on task progress and risk identification.
Limitations: Some users have encountered difficulties with automation, and application integration can be improved.
11. Any.do
Simple task management solution for individuals, families and teams.
Key delegation features: Create to-do lists, add reminders, create and assign tasks and subtasks. Offers multiple views (Calendar, Kanban, Spreadsheet) and over 6,000 integrations. Possibility of enabling automation for task assignment and status updates.
Limitations: Customer service is not always responsive, and some users have had difficulty connecting the application to their calendar.
12. Teambook
Dedicated project resource management tool, with an intuitive interface and secure data in Europe.
Key features for delegation: Offers three key functionalities: operational planning (who works on which project and when, who is available), capacity management (visualize and simulate available and required capacities), and actual time tracking (capture, approval and invoicing of hours actually spent). Enables rapid drag-and-drop allocations and grouped updates. Offers mobile applications, e-mail notifications and calendar synchronization. It is connected and integrated with various tools such as Slack, Google/Outlook Calendars, Zapier.
Benefits: Facilitates online resource management and team performance monitoring. Pricing is based on projects, not per user. From 3 euros per month for up to 10 projects!
In conclusion: why do we recommend Teambook?
Having explored the various solutions available, Teambook stands out as the ideal solution for companies wishing to optimize their project resources. Unlike general-purpose tools, Teambook has been specifically designed to meet the challenges of resource planning and management.
What makes Teambook unique is its ability to give you a clear vision of who does what and when – the very essence of successful delegation.
Its three flagship functions(operational planning, capacity management and effective time tracking) go far beyond the 10 rules we’ve presented in this guide.
Teambook’s intuitive interface makes it easy to apply the 6T method: you can quickly identify the tasks to be delegated, assign them to the right people according to their skills and availability, then monitor progress in real time. No need to juggle several tools or waste time in endless follow-up meetings.
Another major advantage: Teambook respects the confidentiality of your data, with secure hosting in Europe and efficient customer service based in Switzerland– an essential criterion for many companies.
Ready to transform your approach to delegation? Teambook offers a free trial that lets you put the methods presented in this guide to the test. In just a few clicks, you’ll be able to experiment with resource planning, delegate your first tasks using the 6T method, and see the impact on your productivity and that of your team.
Don’t wait any longer to unleash your potential and that of your team. Effective delegation is no longer a challenge, but a competitive advantage within your reach.
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