The Inability to Delegate Effectively Can Be Debilitating for Engineering Managers

Through working with many engineering consulting firms and professionals on management and leadership development programs, I have repeatedly seen delegation as one of the key skills that engineers and other technical professionals struggle with.  What compounds this problem is that delegation is one of those skills that if you can’t do it well, it leads to many other issues because you end up with so much work that you have to do on your own, which leads to stress, and other challenges.

In this post, I want to share with you a portion of the delegation framework that we teach in our Engineering Leadership Accelerator - Level II course, to help you immediately improve your delegation skills.

Why is it hard for engineering professionals to delegate?

Engineers and other technical professionals typically start out in their careers heavily focused on detailed, technical work.  They are performing calculations, running simulations, preparing technical reports, and maybe even giving technical presentations. After doing this for years, they grow fond of this type of work.  They enjoy the analytical side of projects, and like to dive deep into the details. 

Then, five or so years into one’s career, their manager approaches them and says, “Now we need you to give the detailed work away and work on more of the business or managerial side of your projects.”  I am sure that many technical professionals are terrified when they hear this request. At this point, the details have become comfortable to them, and now their manager is asking them to wade into uncharted waters.  They are asking them to give all that up and manage. Seriously?

It is because of this natural progression that many technical professionals will avoid delegating for as long as possible, or they do it, but they do it poorly. And when you are bad at delegating, you might as well not do it at all, because then you are wasting two peoples’ time, yours and the person who you are attempting to delegate to.

How can engineering professionals delegate effectively?

We teach a 5-step framework to help technical professionals delegate which follows the acronym: L-A-U-G-H.  While it’s a bit lengthy to cover in entirety in this article, I do want to focus on what I believe to be the most important step in this process.  The U in the acronym stands for: Understand and communicate your expectations.

When I see technical professionals delegate poorly, failure to clearly communicate expectations is usually the culprit. We use the word ‘Understand’ here as well because usually if you don’t understand exactly what you want, you can’t communicate it to others.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Firstly, a non-engineering related example. What if a parent told his or her child to, “Go clean your room.” How will the child respond? They may go into their room, do a few things and call it clean.  Maybe they quickly make their bed, and straighten up their desk. However, the parent was looking for them to do those things, but also pick up and fold all of the clothes on the floor, throw out the garbage, etc. 

The parent had expectations that weren’t communicated, and the child had their own expectations, creating what is known as an expectation gap. How can the parent be angry with the child for not meeting their expectations if they didn’t communicate them clearly?

Secondly, let’s consider an engineering project where a manager asks an engineer to go out to a project site weekly and perform a site inspection and a report. The manager is looking for information on some very specific items like: are specific safety guidelines being followed, what progress has been made in certain areas of the site, how much material is left on site, etc. The manager also expects a report to be written each week and it should include current photos.

A good way for this manager to get what he or she wants would be to clearly explain what the end product should look like and what it should include. I would even recommend providing a sample report, or even better, for the first site inspection, what if the manager accompanied the engineer to the site, and showed him or her exactly what to look for and they helped in  writing the first report? Yes, it involves a good amount of time for the manager during the first week, but how do you think that will impact results going forward?

How can you immediately improve your delegation skills?

If you clearly communicate what is expected of your team when you assign them tasks, you should immediately see better results. The tradeoff may be a little more of your time up-front, but it should result in much higher quality work, or better yet, you getting what you expected.  You will eliminate the expectation gap.

If you are interested in going through our delegation session as part of our upcoming Engineering Leadership Accelerator Level II course, feel free to message me or give us a call at 800.920.4007.

To your success,

Anthony Fasano, P.E.

Engineering Management Institute | 800-920-4007 | www.EngineeringManagementInstitute.org