Delegation

First of all, welcome to post #200. A little bit of a milestone.

At a meeting tonight, we got into a discussion of delegation. Am I the only one who finds this to be an unwelcome word? I think delegation must be a skill, and that I don't have it.
Why is it important for a leader to delegate?

• I think one of the jobs of committee chairman is to involve as many people as possible in ministry -- that may mean finding a little job for someone who doesn't have a lot of time to give but still wants to be involved. It may mean matching the perfect person to the perfect bigger job.
• When I stop doing this job, there needs to be someone who knows how to do it -- not that what I do is very difficult, but someone who has the confidence to take it on would be helpful. That experience can probably only be gained by being involved in the job itself (Although, really, I didn't start this job having any idea what I was doing, and still don't know most of the time.)
• I want the committee and the church members to have "ownership" over what the committee is doing. The only way that will be done is if they are involved. I get very twitchy when people say, "Kim did it." There is very little that I do on my own; most of what I do requires lots of other people to make happen.

What is it so hard to delegate?

• I like what I do, or at least most of what I do. I don't want to ask someone else to do it; I find joy in it, and want to do it myself.
• I have a certain vision of how things need to be done. If I delegate, I loose that control (I have a feeling that this is probably a problem for a lot of people).
• What happens when the person to whom I delegate a project or task just completely fails to do it? Sometimes that means that some little thing doesn't get done and there is no real consequence; other times the job is important enough that failure isn't an option. It has to be done. What do I do then?
• The biggest reason that I fail to delegate is that I absolutely HATE to ask anyone to do anything. Hate it. Hate it so much that I often just don't do it. I procrastinate recruitment into failure.

It isn't that I never delegate. I often delegate if delegation can be equated to recruitment of volunteers for short term tasks. What makes this easier for me to do is that I do it through email. There's something about not having to ask a person in "person" to do a task that enables me to ask them. Isn't that sad?

An older gentleman on the committee tonight told me that I need to delegate the tasks I like as a form of leadership development (for the delegee). I asked him what I would do if I delegated all the tasks I like to other people. "The things you don't like to do," he answered.

Hmmm. Recruit people (which I HATE to do) to take on the tasks that I like to do in order for me to do the tasks that I don't like to do. There's something wrong with that scenario.

Images: First two images are of the sunrise this morning, taken by S. He's asleep, so I can't ask where he was when he took them, but he drove to Canton, Ohio today, so I would guess that they were taken on I-77 on the way to Parkersburg. The third photo was taken by me on the way home from my meeting. I had to stop the car and take the picture, and I still didn't do it justice. It was a gorgeous sunset.