 Do you feel like you need to do everything yourself to get it done right? You might need a little help with delegation. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. If you're a manager and you're feeling overwhelmed at work, chances are you could probably delegate some more to your team. Today I'll give you three tips on how to delegate effectively so it doesn't make more work for you. And stay tuned to the end because I'm going to give you a link to download your free Leadership Development Plan Workbook. We're always talking about how busy we are and for me being busy is a great thing because it keeps me out of trouble. But there's such a thing as being too busy, especially when we have a team around us who can help. When I was in the Air Force staying late at work and having a lot to do had become this badge of honor and to be honest people's personal lives, their relationships with their families and even their health was starting to suffer a little bit. Now don't get me wrong, there were a lot of times something really important and urgent was happening and I worked a lot of nights and I worked a lot of weekends in the Air Force and that's what you sign up for when you're in the military and I don't regret any of that. But looking around me at times it seemed that a little bit of delegation could have gone a long way to improve the situation. And so to delegate effectively you have to do it right and here are three tips to help you delegate effectively. Tip number one is to set clear expectations of success when you delegate. No matter who you're delegating to make sure you tell them what the problem is you want them to solve, when you want it solved by and try to give them some parameters of what the successful solution will look like. You don't want to get too detailed, you don't want to tie their hands by putting a lot of restrictions on them and if you're thinking that much about what the solution is going to look like you might as well do it yourself and that defeats the whole purpose of delegating. So when you're thinking about this try to think about what the deal breakers are what's the solution you cannot accept and communicate that to the person you're giving this task to. That'll let them have some free reign on how they're going to figure things out but we'll also let them know not to cross any lines. Tip number two is to delegate authority as well as responsibility and this is where a lot of new managers and leaders get tripped up. To delegate effectively you have to let your team make decisions and take actions in the best interest of the solution to the problem you've asked them to solve. If you make them come back to you for every single decision you're going to tie their hands creatively on the solution that they're trying to come up with and you're going to take up a lot of the valuable time you were trying to get back in the first place and that defeats the purpose of delegation. So the best approach is decide ahead of time what are the decisions you really want to reserve for yourself those most important decisions you feel you need to make yourself and then let the team make all the other decisions. If it's a long-term project going on for a few weeks or a few months you can always schedule in some vector checks to have the team come talk to you and check their thought process before they go off and make some of those decisions and I think you'll find that's a more effective way on a long-term project than just letting them make decisions and waiting till the end and then being dissatisfied with the solution. Tip number three is to let your team make mistakes. Every time you delegate it's an opportunity for someone on your team to learn and grow as a leader. People do that best by trying new things making mistakes and learning from the mistakes and correcting them as they go. Now I know we'd all prefer that people didn't make mistakes on our team and that we didn't make mistakes but it's all part of the learning process and it's better they do it now when the stakes are low and we're there to help them than when they're in a position of leadership later on. This requires a little bit of commitment on our part as a leader. We've got to commit to being patient, letting our team go through making mistakes, correcting them and recognizing we may not get the perfect solution when it comes out at the end but that's okay. So the best thing we can do is try to recognize how critical this task is, how precise and perfect does this solution need to be and factor that in when we're trying to decide who to delegate to and how much authority to give them when we delegate. If you found this helpful please like, comment and share this with a friend or co-worker. Click on that link below that'll let you download our free Leadership Development Plan workbook and help you set your goals for the next two, five to ten years to get the career you're looking for. If you have any business or leadership questions leave them in the comments for us we'll answer them for you or email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com. EvilGeniusleadership.com is also where you can find out about our coaching programs so if you want to do some more one-on-one training and handle some of the specific things that you're facing we can do that for you. Thanks for watching today I really appreciate it and remember the future is out there. Lead the way.