A common cause for ineffective team management is poor delegation skills. Often, when priorities need clearing in shorter timescales, the supervisor's solution is to increase their personal effort or adopt an authoritarian approach to team members. This causes alienation, even resistance, and often induces stress, even chaos. A few delegation skills goes a long way.

Supervisor Training needs to recognise that supervisor time is in fact the sum of the time available from his/her team, and that without effective delegation skills management demands for utilisation and development of the team resource cannot be achieved. However, to be effective delegation skills must include developmental processes.

Programme Introduction

When it comes to supervisor training people often misunderstand what delegation skills represent and therefore delegation itself is mismanaged, and mistrusted. Consequently there is often reluctance by both sides to use delegation skills as a developmental strategy. For example, managers may be reluctant to engage delegation skills for fear that they may end up without a job; the prospect of redundancy is a significant barrier to enhancing the productivity of others. Alternatively recipients of the process may see utilisation of delegation skills as a tactic of burdening them with even more work when they feel they are already overloaded, are just being "put upon", i.e. they will not see the use of delegation skills as a means to receive recognition or career advancement or reward. (This then is what this delegation skills supervisor training is designed to achieve).

Yet management capability is partly dependant upon an ability to redirect or delegate activity. This demands the use of delegation skills. To become an effective, and indispensable manager, requires an understanding of the nature of work and people, and an ability to focus on key results and secure them with optimum resource use. Priorities need setting, and work flows studying to ensure that it is being done via the most appropriate process chain. Finally people need to understand how their work contributes to the organisation and appreciate the need for change. They must accept new work tasks, methods, and techniques and see change as an opportunity to develop so their effectiveness and productivity is enhanced and they become a more valued asset. This then is the underpining philosophy promoting effective use of delegation skills.

Therefore, use of delegation skills is not simply a matter of convenience, but a way of life. If used correctly, delegation skills is a most profound vehicle for self, as well as subordinate development, resulting in a productive, satisfying and rewarding team environment. Our supervisor training delegation skills course will probe all these issues. It will set the scene by giving participants a perspective on delegation skills. They will examine the benefits of using delegation skills but also the barriers to its acceptance and how these can be overcome. Participants will then study the delegation process itself, e.g., what should be delegated, to whom and how it should be managed, monitored and evaluated.

The delegation skills training course moves from attitudes and how to deal with them, through techniques and prepares participants to consider the higher level question of what can be done to make even more effective use of the organisation resource. The answer to this question comes by studying process chains. Use of delegation skills is not about handing over a task. It is important to question whether a) the job is really needed and then b) what processes will be required, c) who in the chain needs to be involved and only then d) effect delegation of duties and broaden the scope of participating individuals. This could introduce participants to thinking on project management and process re-engineering.

To achieve this goal participants are asked to review their job structure, and that of their subordinates, to examine in which way time savings can be made and what work could be effectively delegated.