Mistakes we sometimes make as bosses (unable to delegate)

This is the second post of a series of articles I am writing about the mistakes we commit frequently as bosses. Many times when we have people in charge we commit mistakes in the way we manage our tasks that make our life and our employees’ life more difficult and also the company’s processes. On the first post of this series of articles I talked about mistaken ways to correct our employees. This time the subject will be the difficulty some bosses have when they need to delegate.

It is true that many times we think we perform tasks better than anyone else. This in addition to be mistaken, because everyone has quality’s that can make them even better than us, makes processes more slow and difficult. We must remember that in our work we have a limited resource that is time. Even if we use all our time for working, we are not going to have more than 24 hours a day. This is one of the reasons why we have employees, because only in this way we can multiply this limited resource.

The problem when we think we can perform in a better way the tasks of our work team is that we don’t take advantage of these extra hours we are gaining when we have people in charge. In this way we start to create bottlenecks that are unnecessary and we end up with employees that don’t perform the tasks why they were hired for and loose time in other tasks. We as bosses end up performing the tasks of our team, which is not fair nor efficient.

Here we can have two situations. The first one is that we don’t trust in a good team that we have which is a problem that comes totally from ourselves. If this is your case you must reevaluate this situation. Try to delegate slowly some tasks you shouldn’t be performing and that you have self-assigned. At first maybe you will want to verify them, but over time your employees are going to learn.

The second situation might be that your team definitely doesn’t have the knowledge and skills to perform their tasks. In this case you should try to teach them, train them or in the worst cases modify your team.

I hope this post helps you to change this mistake we frequently make as bosses. Wait for my next posts where I will present other of these frequent mistakes.

Image taken from Flickr.com