Techniques that help with productivity: delegation and empowerment

One way to improve your own productivity is to distribute responsibilities and actions around, and this can be done using two techniques. They can be done in different moments or in a sequence, starting with the first one and moving to the second one, according to the time, process maturity or simply as an experiment.

The first one is DELEGATION. You know, when a parent sends their kid to the grocery store; the kid is not really responsible yet for the transaction and any mistake he commits it is the parent’s responsibility. Delegation is a very powerful educational tool and it helps to develop a sense of responsibility with the load, particularly the emotional one. But to delegate specially to an adult, it is important:

• To have it clear the responsibility is still yours and any error committed by the person is YOURS, so are you ready for that?
• To never blame the person for a mistake, even though you have explained about it 100 times… Sometimes it takes 101 times to make it perfect.
• You have to do a constant follow-up and check-up of the process; you cannot leave it like that. Meetings are an excellent method for it.
• To sustain the person not only as a professional, if that is the case, but also as an individual. Talk with them, listen to them and encourage them.

DELEGATION is often used in a boss-employee, parent-child or teacher-student situation, that is, when it is very clear the other person is not capable for any reason to take over a responsibility. But, what happens when they are expert?

EMPOWERMENT is a technique used to basically create new leaders or at least new bosses. It is when the child is big already and they take over the responsibility of doing the monthly shopping for the house. In this case, empowerment comes as a natural and organic successor for delegation.

But if we are talking about workplace situations or a group of friends, or even within the family but in a different context, empowerment shouldn’t be used lightly. I know many people from a newer generation feel they are expert in some aspects, but experience is not something you can get from a college or by reading something; it comes with time.

This technique implies that the responsibility will be transferred to that empowered person, and so the leader has to have a very good leadership capacity to understand when to empower and we will talk about empowerment later. In terms of productivity, either of them will help you by doing more things in a much better way.

I hope this helps you to be more productive! This was the last one on this series…

https://lookingformorethanjob.blogspot.com/2019/06/tips-of-productivity.html