A Coaching Call Trend

We all want to reduce our stress. As we enter the new year, stress abounds like never before. In fact, the last few weeks of coaching calls, I’ve heard of managers and partners planning to reduce their stress by delegating. This is really positive because it is necessary and appropriate. Yet the problem is that delegation in a time of stressful overwhelm goes against our natural response to control the situation.

A primary stress response when you feel when overwhelmed is to grab more tightly onto what you already know and are comfortable with. As a professional, it means that you are more likely to hold on to what you know (and know how to control). Obviously, this is a problem when it comes to delegating. From partners on down, holding on too tightly for too long isn’t helpful for anyone—you, staff, clients or the firm.

3 Challenges to Delegation

There are three areas where delegation needs to happen but can be challenging. One is delegating tasks. Early in your career, delegating tasks taught you to assign work to those more inexperienced than you are. You learned the right amount of attention and checking in so that you didn’t over or under-manage the task or the person. Nicely done.

Another challenging area is delegating the whole engagement. That’s a bit riskier. Letting someone be responsible in their own way, different from your way, is tricky. You are responsible for the result without the benefit of controlling it. But giving someone the responsibility but insisting on it being done your way isn’t really delegating and hampers the whole operation.

A third area of challenging delegation is involving others in the client relationship. For instance, too many senior managers and partners are too accessible to clients that could be served by younger, competent staff. While it feels good to be the go-to for clients, it’s only a good thing when it is appropriate. I had to chuckle when one experienced manager told me that a long-time, small client called and asked specifically for her. So the receptionist forwarded the call to the manager, only to be asked where their tax organizer was. Oh my. What a great lesson in shifting client relationships where appropriate.

The Delegation Plan

From these three challenges, what should you be delegating? To whom? When? How will you ensure everything is on track without micromanaging? If you don’t delegate, but hold on to what you shouldn’t, you actually increase your stress, not reduce it.

As you enter compression season, avoid the tendency to hold on to delegable tasks, engagements and relationships that detract you from what you should be doing. Fight the urge to know everything, being done your way, with you being in the middle of it. That will only create more stress.