6 Selecting a Team Member for Delegation

All of your team members can benefit from delegation, and you should look for opportunities to delegate to everyone in your team. But if you have a particular job to delegate, you need to think about who is the 'right' person to do the job.

This involves considering the requirements of the job and the needs of your team members. Let's look at the requirements of the job first.

There are four questions to ask.

• What experience, expertise, skills and attitudes are needed to do the job? The job may require a high level of technical know-how or previous experience, which only certain members of your team possess.

• How urgent is the job? If you need the job done urgently, you will have less time to spend briefing and supporting an inexperienced team member. You may want to delegate an urgent job to someone who has done a similar task before, and who is already competent to do it.

• What are the consequences of missing deadlines, or making mistakes? By thinking about the importance of getting the job right first time and the deadline for completing it, you can judge the level of risk you are prepared to take in giving the task to someone who has never done it before.

• What is the most economical way of getting the job done?

Let's look at an example to explain this last point.