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Continuing Education

ESS 806
Delegating That Works

Course Outlines
Everyone has experienced delegation failure. In most cases there are two obvious 'victims' - the person doing the assignment and the manager or supervisor who gave it to them. The real problem, however, is the resulting cost to the organization of lost productivity, sagging morale, and the all-too-familiar 'blame game'. When delegation failure happens, who do you think is more often responsible - the performer, or their supervisor? If you said the latter, you'd be right, at least according to the research in this area. The good news, though, is that research has also identified a process and a set of skills that any supervisor can learn that will virtually guarantee effective delegation. This process and skill-set is at the heart of this course. Participants will learn a simple, practical approach to delegating work to others that 'gets things done right the first time'. The course identifies the most common causes of delegation failure and then directly addresses them. Participants will learn to define the key performance requirements of any work assignment in clear, behavioural terms, and turn these into an 'agenda' to guide communication. They will also learn how to select the right performer for an assignment, and to communicate effectively with them, leading to clear understanding, genuine commitment and successful completion of even complex assignments. Finally, participants will learn how to use an 'After Action Review' to capture important insights from everyone involved in the completion of an assignment - an important step in continuing to build capacity in a working group.

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