Reframing delegation: From stress to success
Summary: Effective delegation in hospitality management is crucial but often challenging. Reframing it as a long-term investment promotes team growth. Effective managers avoid assumptions, encourage open communication, and allow staff to choose tasks they want to learn, fostering engagement and skill development while balancing workloads.
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In today's fast-paced, ever-changing world that is hospitality, effective delegation is a crucial skill for managers. Effective delegation can have countless positive ripple effects within a team. It can lead to improved operations, better resource allocation, and better workload management for team members. In addition, it can empower teams and individuals to learn, grow, and take on new projects. Despite these potential benefits, many still struggle with delegation and struggle to implement it in their day-to-day work.
We both understand how difficult actually delegating can be from our personal experience managing projects and managing others. We recognize the benefits of delegating in our minds, but sometimes it seems like just doing a task yourself will be faster and easier. Sometimes you don’t know someone else’s skill set, so you convince yourself that it’s best that you just do a task so the outcome is up to your standard.
There are many more reasons why delegation can be a hurdle. However, one specific reason that often comes up when we’re talking with restaurant managers in our Leading in Restaurants program is the perception that delegating will create more work for them as a manager and only add to their stress. And when we’re already stressed and feel like we have too much on our plate, adding one more thing doesn’t sound appealing.
If a manager can overcome the challenges to delegating, the potential upsides are massive. We wanted to explore this topic in more depth to provide some tips for how to frame delegation to ourselves to make it less daunting. We also wanted to outline a couple of simple things managers can do to make delegation seem like more of a team effort versus “one more thing they have to do.”
To tackle this topic, we captured a conversation between the two of us in response to a client question, “How can you reframe the sentiment that delegating creates more work for you as a manager?”
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Reframing Delegation as an Investment
Deirdre Auld: One thing that came to mind is thinking about it like the stock market. We go into the stock market and we buy stocks or we invest in the market to have a long-term impact. Sometimes we go in and we think we're going to get rich quick, which we know doesn't happen. And you tend to have the reverse effect when you're in for a short period of time and pulling your money out. But like the stock market, it really is about an investment and having long -term gains.
If we can think about delegation in the same sentiment, it gives us the space to allow that widening of frame of time to say, “Hey, I'm making an investment that's going to pay off in the future. It might not pay off in this moment. It might cause a little bit more stress in this moment. But future me is going to feel great about the choices that I'm making right now to invest in somebody else's education or learning.”
Cassie Francisco: Yeah, I love that. It's expanding the time frame. It's helping you get out of the moment where you might feel stressed and like you have a lot of work. Think about a week from now, a month from now, and a year from now. When you delegate to that other person, all of a sudden that work isn't on your plate anymore. You can worry less about it.
One other thing that comes to mind, too, is thinking of delegation as a learning opportunity for someone on your team. It may take them a little bit of time to get up to speed, but then they will have new knowledge, they will feel invested in, and they will feel more engaged in their work because they are able to try something new and use their creativity to solve problems.
Avoiding Assumptions in Delegation
Deirdre: Something that you and I talk a lot about, Cassie, especially in our coaching practices, is that one trap that we fall into that tends to go hand-in-hand with delegation is the assumption factor, where we often get in our head about, “I don't want to put this on somebody because they already have so much on their plate,” or “They're going to think I'm giving too much away,” or, “They don't want to do this task, it's a horrible task.”
In those moments, often we're actually making assumptions as leaders about whether they feel those ways. Very often we forget to do the most simple thing, which is ask somebody. And you and I have both seen great success in coaching clients around the idea of just ask. Let's remove the assumption. Let's test the waters. Let's see how somebody feels.
And in particular, a really easy trick to delegating is to ask somebody what it is that they'd be interested in taking off of your plate or doing from your role that would be a fun learning experience for them or something that would be a stretch project for them, so that they can also start to level up like you're talking about in their own education.
Involving Team Members in Delegation
Cassie: An example is coming to mind from one of our participants who was talking about opening their patio. We all know that patio season is here. I'm going to be sitting on lots of patios, but there is a lot of work and planning that goes into opening a patio. It's expanding the service area, things have to be set up, staff have to know what they're doing.
This particular team did a really smart thing where they actually had people sign up for the things that they wanted to do. It was a way to delegate, but also to ask for input and not make assumptions about what other people wanted to do. I thought that was a great tip that a lot of us could learn from.
Deirdre: Yeah, you're really checking off a bunch of boxes with that approach. Like you said, you're being inclusive, you are stretching the possibilities, you're delegating. You are also getting ideas that maybe hadn't happened before, which really helps to improve the operation.
Cassie: Yeah, okay, so to summarize, “how can you reframe the sentiment that delegating will give me more stress as a manager?” We talked about expanding our perspective and looking at delegating as an investment in the future. We've talked about looking at delegating as offering a learning opportunity to your team. And we also talked through maybe not making assumptions on what our team members can take on and checking in with them to see what they might want to take off your plate or someone else's plate.
Deirdre: We're delegating experts now!
Cassie: Yes, great. All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll be back again soon to share some more tips and insights.
