DELEGATION AND EDUCATION
Some managers do not want to delegate their work.
“My team members are inexperienced.”
“I do it myself until I teach it.”
“Only people at my level can do these things.”
“No one else can do these things but for me.”
“Team members don’t have the ability to make decisions as I do.”
Management is the process of directing people and tasks rather than actually doing them. Besides that, as a project manager gives more responsibility to team members, their development is contributed.
The expectation from a manager is not a simple function of assigning jobs and querying the status of those jobs. So, what kind of path should a manager follow so that the team members can manage themselves?
I met a young manager at a firm that I consulted, who attaches great importance to this issue. He is a civil engineer. He had attended a course given by me to manage his projects more effectively. The training was mainly about learning a project management software.
5–6 months after the training, he called me to the construction site where he worked and asked for consultancy on a few issues.
When he started to talk about his work, I saw how this young engineer was embraced as a leader by his team.
This young engineer taught his team members how to use project management software. The team started to update the progressing works every weekend through the software by exchanging information among themselves. They were determining the next week’s work on the plan and distributing tasks among themselves.
I was very impressed and very happy with what I saw. The team addressed two key issues at each meeting. What level are they in terms of time management, and cost management. For these two main titles, they defined two roles as Time Team Leader and Cost Team Leader.
Project management software was being updated simultaneously by these two leaders based on data from team members. Progress presentations were being made to team members and managers every weekend. In fact, I saw that even making a presentation was done by the staff for some stages. This allowed everyone to contribute to the administrative process and to increase their awareness. With this method, the manager told me that while team members take ownership of their work more, they start to come up with new ideas to increase efficiency.
It is very important for team members to manage themselves and to be involved in administrative decisions. I observed and shared an example that supports this situation above, but it should not be overlooked that the triggering factor in this example is education. Team members must have reached the level of education required by the project in order to make rational decisions.
In this article, I explained that a manager should give confidence to his team in order to be seen as a leader by his team. Here, one way to give that confidence is to constantly train team members and enable them to develop.
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