You will be able to produce a delegation plan that moves real work off your desk over the next month.
Most new managers know they should hand work over, and many end the month doing the same tasks they did before. Delegation kept in your head tends to happen in small pieces or not at all. A written plan with names, dates and limits moves real work off your desk over the next month. It brings together three things from earlier in the module: the five-part brief from Lesson 3.1, the experience and authority levels from Lesson 3.2, and the checkpoints from Lesson 3.3. Drafting it takes about half an hour, and the first handover conversation should happen this week.
The plan can be a spreadsheet or a simple table in a document. Use one row per task, with these columns:
Task: the work, described as an outcome. Hours per week: roughly how long the task takes you now. Person: who will own the task. Why them: what the person will learn or gain from it. Experience with this task: low, moderate or high. Authority level: look into it, recommend, decide and tell me, or decide alone. Checkpoints: the dates or stages when you will look at the work. Handover conversation: the date you will brief the person. Stop date: the date after which you no longer do the task.
Start by listing what you still do that someone else could own. Begin with the hand-over column of your list from Lesson 1.2, "What to keep doing yourself and what to let go", and your calendar audit from Lesson 1.1, then add recurring tasks those two missed. The best candidates repeat weekly or monthly, take real time, and do not need your authority.
Pick a few to start. If you hand over many tasks at once, you will be checking many pieces of new work while you are still learning to delegate.
Match each task to a person who would learn something from it. Avoid giving tasks to whoever happens to be least busy. Workload is a separate issue: if the right person is already full, move something else off their plate. Use what people have said in one-on-ones about what they want more of.
Judge experience for the specific task, rather than the person's experience in general. Then set the authority level and the checkpoints to match. Low experience means more checkpoints and a lower authority level to start. An authority level can also carry an exception, for example decide and tell me in general, but recommend for certain cases.
Book a time for each handover conversation. In it, go through the five-part brief: what done looks like, why it matters, constraints, deadline, and who to ask. End by asking the person to play the brief back to you.
Then set the stop date, the point after which you will not do the task yourself, even if you are tempted. Without one, many handovers drift into a permanent shared arrangement where you still do half the work. Checkpoints take up some of your time at first, so the full time saving arrives gradually.
In Lesson 1.4, "Write your first-90-days manager charter", Wei Ling set a charter target of 16 hours a week of hands-on work, down from about 31. She needed to move about 15 hours a week. Her list had seven candidate tasks, and she picked three to start with. The hours below are her own estimates.
Row one went to Arjun: run the Changi client account so the client's issues are resolved within one working day, 8 hours a week. It is his first top-tier account, the step he has been asking for. His experience with client handling is high, so his authority is decide and tell me, except refunds above the team limit, which are recommend. Checkpoints are weekly in their one-on-ones for the first month, then monthly. The handover is next Tuesday, with a joint call to introduce him to the client. The stop date is four weeks from the handover.
Row two also went to Arjun: take first contact on routine escalations so each one is resolved or routed within the day, 4 hours a week. He already takes some of these calls and has asked for the authority to settle them. His experience is moderate, so he can decide and tell her for anything inside policy and recommend for anything outside it. They review the escalation log together each Friday for three weeks. The handover is the same Tuesday, and the stop date is two weeks.
Row three went to Hui Min: produce the monthly service report so it is accurate and reaches Daniel by the 5th, about 3 hours a week across the month. She wants more variety and her spreadsheet skills are strong, but her experience with this report is low. Her authority is recommend, with Wei Ling approving the report before it goes to Daniel. Her checkpoints are a data check in week one, a draft review three working days before the deadline, and a final read the day before. The handover is at Thursday's one-on-one, followed by one month of shadowing, and the stop date is after the second month.
8 plus 4 plus 3 is 15 hours a week, which matches the gap in her charter. The checkpoints take some of her time at first, so the full saving arrives over two or three months.
Now draft your own. Choose the three tasks, fill in the columns, and book the first handover before you close the file. Your plan is complete when it has at least three rows with every column filled in, each task is written as an outcome, there is a reason beside each person's name, and every row has a stop date. Put the first handover conversation in your calendar for this week, and link the plan from each person's one-on-one document so the checkpoints get reviewed.
Fill in the delegation plan for at least three tasks, then hold the first handover conversation this week.
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