In the briefing stage, and in the commitment stage, I alluded to the fact there are different levels of delegation different amounts of authority is the term I used when we use the boat acronym. In this video, I want to talk to you about the five levels of delegation. So you get a sense of the range of choices available to you. And, of course, the first level is declining to delegate, making the decision that the circumstances aren't right for a successful delegation, that the match doesn't work, or that the task is not one that is appropriate to delegate. Retain responsibility as well as accountability for yourself and stand the person down. Hopefully, you won't need to do this very often.

You will have already made the right decision to not delegate before you get to the briefing. The second level of delegation is one that I might call instructing. This is where you give very clear instruction around the steps and the stages and what it is you expect the person to do. You break it down into small chunks, and typically, you would feed them those small chunks a bit at a time. This is the level of delegation that's suitable for an inexperienced person tackling an important task. One where the risks of failure are high in terms of their consequences, and therefore that close management and that clear instruction is going to minimize the risk of danger to them, danger to the organization and danger to you.

This is not a highly motivating approach, but it is an important strategy for teaching people the basics and in highly regulated environments where you've got new people taking on tasks, it may be a necessary approach to delegation. The third level is supervising. This is where you reduce the amount of instruction a little bit. But you keep a close eye on what's going on. But you do provide more support to help guide people through. You're not telling them what to do, but you may be asking questions, you may be helping them to understand what they're learning.

The instructions will be at a higher level and cover larger areas of the task, giving them more scope to figure things out. And then, as they figure them out, you're confirming or correcting as necessary. level four, takes this a step further. It's where you're assisting the person that you've delegated the work to. They're taking the lead, they're making most of the choices. But they're coming back to you for guidance and support when they need it.

You're available and you're checking in reasonably frequently, as much to show that you're there and able and willing to assist as to actually involve yourself in the tasks they're doing. This is clearly a suitable approach for someone who is learning a lot, who has a lot of experience and skills. Someone who you can almost trust to do it, but either you don't have or they don't have the full confidence for you to be hands off, and to even trust the whole task to them without supervision. And trust is at the heart of the fifth and final level. I call it interesting because you're going to entrust the whole task to them. Your supervision assistance monitoring, support is going to be at the lowest possible level.

In fact, for some colleagues, in some circumstances, it may be no more than you making clear to them that you are available anytime they need you. But you don't check up on them at all. And you only have a detailed conversation at the end when they're reporting back on their success. Obviously, there may be gradations to this, he may check periodically, you may have a conversation, guidance maybe, but more likely, just a little bit of endorsement of the choices they're making. So those are our five levels of delegation. That kind of hands off, declining to delegate instructing, supervising, assisting and interesting.

Choose the right one, and the delegation will work magnificently well, and if this approach to choosing delegation styles appeals to you, do take a look at my day to day leadership course, which covers these ideas in a great deal more detail.