You will produce a delegation plan that moves real work off your desk over the next month.
You have the pieces from this 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. This exercise puts them into one plan that moves real work off your desk over the next month. It takes about half an hour to draft, and the first handover conversation should happen this week.
A spreadsheet or a simple table in a document works. Use one row per task, with these columns.
Task: the work, described as an outcome. Hours per week: roughly how long it takes you now. Person: who will own it. Why them: what they 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 it. Handover conversation: the date you will brief them. Stop date: the date after which you no longer do it yourself.
Step 1 is to list what you still do that someone else could own. Start from the hand-over column of your list in lesson 1.2, What to keep doing yourself and what to let go, and from your calendar audit in lesson 1.1, then add the recurring tasks those two missed. The best candidates repeat weekly or monthly, take real time, and don't need your authority. Wei Ling's list had seven candidates. She picked three to start with, because handing over seven things at once would leave her checking seven pieces of new work while she was still learning to delegate.
Step 2 is to match each task to a person who would grow from it. Don't hand tasks to whoever is least busy. Hand them to the person who would learn something, then deal with workload separately by moving something else off their plate if needed. Use what you have heard in one-on-ones about what people want more of.
Step 3 is to set experience, authority and checkpoints. Judge the person's experience with that specific task, then set the authority level and checkpoints to match. Low experience gets more checkpoints and a lower authority level to start.
Step 4 is to plan the handover and the stop date. Book a time for each handover conversation and use the five-part brief: what done looks like, why it matters, constraints, deadline and who to ask. End by asking the person to play it back. 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 the manager still does half.
In lesson 1.4, Write your first-90-days manager charter, Wei Ling set a target of 16 hours a week of hands-on work, down from about 31. That meant moving about 15 hours a week. Her three rows, with hours as her own estimates:
Row one. Task: run the Changi client account so the client's issues are resolved within one working day. Hours: 8 a week. Person: Arjun. Why him: his first top-tier account, the step he has been asking for. Experience: high for client handling. Authority: decide and tell me, except refunds above the team limit, which are recommend. Checkpoints: weekly in one-on-ones for the first month, then monthly. Handover: next Tuesday, with a joint call to introduce him to the client. Stop date: four weeks from the handover.
Row two. Task: take first contact on routine escalations so each one is resolved or routed within the day. Hours: 4 a week. Person: Arjun. Why him: he already takes some of these calls and has asked for the authority to settle them, so his experience is moderate. Authority: decide and tell me for anything inside policy, recommend for anything outside. Checkpoints: review the escalation log together each Friday for three weeks. Handover: the same Tuesday. Stop date: two weeks.
Row three. Task: produce the monthly service report so it is accurate and reaches Daniel by the 5th. Hours: about 3 a week across the month. Person: Hui Min. Why her: she wants more variety, and her spreadsheet skills are strong. Experience: low for this report. Authority: recommend, with Wei Ling approving before it goes to Daniel. Checkpoints: data check in week one, draft review three working days before the deadline, final read the day before. Handover: Thursday's one-on-one, then one month of shadowing. Stop date: after the second month.
Total: 8 plus 4 plus 3 is 15 hours a week, which matches the gap in her charter. She will spend some of that time on checkpoints at first, so the full saving arrives over two or three months.
You have a plan with at least three rows and every column filled in. Each task is written as an outcome, each person has a reason beside their name, and each row has a stop date. The first handover conversation is in your calendar for this week, and the plan is linked from each person's one-on-one document so the checkpoints get reviewed.
Choose the three tasks, fill in the columns, and book the first handover before you close the file.
Complete the delegation plan for at least three tasks and hold the first handover conversation this week.
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