You’ve probably noticed that we talk a lot about “aligning.” That’s because setting and aligning on expectations is a foundation for all things management, whether you’re delegating projects, hiring, setting goals, or evaluating performance.
When you communicate expectations during the delegation, onboarding, or evaluation process, you create a foundation for excellent results. And, when you’re not aligned, your foundation gets unstable, leading to problems down the road.
Learn how to delegate effectively with three best practices from The Management Center.
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Key Takeaways
- Make the implicit explicit. When delegating a project, share what’s in your head, clearly and specifically. Don’t expect others to read your mind. When you’re not explicit about your expectations, you create conditions for misunderstanding at best and inequitable impacts at worst.
- Seek perspective. Delegation should be a conversation. Invite staff input early in the delegation process. By incorporating their viewpoints, you can generate new approaches that lead to better results.
- Align on the 5 W’s. Get clear on what success looks like, before the work is in motion. Discuss the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, why) with your direct report.
How to Get Aligned and Delegate Effectively
We recommend three best practices to get aligned with team members as you delegate roles and projects.
1. Make the implicit explicit
Take the invisible expectations and assumptions that you have in your head and articulate them. The things that feel crystal clear to you might not be on the other person’s radar. This is a critical step for equity and inclusion.
So, make things explicit on the front end when you’re defining success, rather than mid-stream when you’re fixing mistakes or on the backend when you’re evaluating the work.
Be explicit about:
- The definition of success.
Use our delegation worksheet to talk through what success will look like for a project. If you have past examples of a similar project, share them. For projects that are new or complicated, or that you’ll be less involved with, you can offer helpful guardrails by specifying what you don’t want to see. - The context.
Give them a heads up about resources they can reference, people to reach out to, potential challenges, and past history of success or failure (if a similar project has been done before). - Preferences, traditions, and requirements.
Think through your preference and traditions—especially when communicating expectations about approach, or how the work happens (see: Setting Expectations for How Staff Approach Their Work). It’s okay to have preferences, but you should explicitly name the difference between your preferences and requirements for the project. Be open to other approaches and perspectives (more on that later). - What you’re not sure about.
If there’s anything you feel unclear about, share it. At best, it can be an invitation for the person to partner with you and get to clarity together. At the very least, it explains any vagueness or uncertainty you may be expressing.
Why? The more you and the other person diverge in terms of identity, life experience, culture, and perspective—or the more they differ from your organization’s dominant culture—the less they can intuit expectations. Making the implicit explicit bridges that gap to produce stronger relationships and better results.
And, let’s be clear: results and relationships aren’t the only things at stake for your staff member. The more positive your evaluation of their performance, the more they benefit—from higher compensation, to opportunities and a sense of belonging. Making the implicit explicit reduces implicit bias and miscommunication.
2. Seek and incorporate new perspectives
Delegation should be a conversation, not a dictation. Invite input with these questions:
- What do you think about what I’ve shared so far?
- Is there anything I’ve shared that you disagree with or have a different take on?
- What am I missing?
- Is there anything that you think we should change about this plan?
- Based on your context and experience, what’s at least one part of what I just shared that you’d push back on?
Note that these questions focus on surfacing disagreement and dissent. One thing that healthy, resilient relationships (especially managerial ones) have in common is that there’s enough psychological safety for different—sometimes conflicting—ideas and opinions to surface. If you’re the manager, it’s on you to welcome and invite differences of opinions and outside-the-box ideas. Learning more about someone else’s perspective ultimately improves team culture and results.
Note: It’s not enough to ask for input if you never do anything with it. Perspective-seeking is best paired with receptivity. Even if you aren’t able to incorporate their ideas immediately, it can help inform your approach in the future.
3. Get aligned on the 5 Ws
Once you’ve each shared what’s in your heads, it’s time to align on “the 5 Ws” (who, what, when, where, why) and how. In other words, get clear on:
- what success looks like
- when the project needs to be completed by
- why the project or assignment is important
- where they can go to for resources and support
- who should be involved
- how they should approach the work
- how you’ll be checking in
Use our delegation worksheet to prep for this conversation and capture expectations you’ve agreed to.
The Management Center is a 501c3 organization that helps leaders working for social change build equitable, sustainable, and results-driven organizations via trainings coaching, and online resources and tools.