3 tips for delegating assignments you don't know how to do

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As managers, there is an expectation that you can supervise people who have jobs that you have not done. While you might find yourself managing a team of salespeople after having been a salesperson yourself, more likely than not, you’ll have people on your team who have duties that you’ve never done. The key to being a good boss is not trying to master your employees’ duties; it’s making room for them to do their duties, and supporting them as they navigate their way. 

Practically it can be difficult to manage expectations of assignments if you don’t have a sense of how involved projects are and how long it should take your employees to do them. If you’re delegating assignments without knowledge of how long they should take to complete, keep these tips in mind.

1. Find someone who has done similar assignments and get a sense of how long their tasks took. For instance, when planning a public health program, I needed to know how many Hepatitis C tests my staff members should be expected to perform in a year. Although my team hadn’t done these tests before, other employees at my agency had done HIV tests, which were similar in setup and structure (10 minutes of intake and pretest counseling, 5 minutes for the actual sample drawing, and another 10 minutes for education and giving results). If a result came back positive, this usually added another hour to the encounter as the employee would need to provide more in-depth counseling and connection to care. To estimate what was possible for my team, I looked at how many the HIV tests the other team had completed in a year, divided by the number of people doing those tests. Since our anticipated positivity rate for Hepatitis C was double that of the team doing HIV tests, we added several more hours to our calculations to make sure employees had enough time to manage positive results and not fall behind on the number of tests they needed to do. 
    
2. Measure performance between several employees to figure out the average time for completing the assignment. If it takes your highly productive employees 10 minutes to document each Hepatitis C test, and your easily distracted employees 20 minutes, you can find the average at 15 minutes. However, if you know that it’s possible to document the tests in 10 minutes, you may push your distracted employees to focus, thereby reducing the average time and making your team more efficient.
    
3. Leave room for improvement with new assignments. When you delegate a task to someone, she will likely do it slower her first few times, as she increases speed with an increasing sense of comfort and familiarity with the task. If it takes an employee 30 minutes to clean up the test counseling room at the end of her first day, don’t assume it will always take her 30 minutes. She will likely improve her timing as her confidence grows. However, if there are limits beyond her control, for instance, if she must leave a disinfectant on all surfaces for 30 minutes, then this task will always take that long. The timing only gets better for those tasks that require human efficiency, with little barriers to completion.

How do you manage expectations of employees when you haven’t completed their tasks before? Share your tips with us in the comments below.