For your perusing pleasure:

• How to change people’s perception of you
• Need to file a tax extension? (yes, yes I do)
• Best foot forward from the start (small business startup advice)

• Check out a nice “I need to take a 5 minute break” read on today’s Tip of the Day.
• Do you know how to delegate responsibility? See this article on delegating too much responsibility to avoid a common delegation pitfall.

Being able to delegate responsibility is universally seen as a necessary quality in a good supervisor. It is often seen as one of the major gateways to getting into the “management” level in a person’s career. However, is it actually possible to delegate too much responsibility? Can this actually hurt you in the long run? I think so.

It is my belief that while being able to delegate responsibility is important, you still want to make sure that you have at least an inkling of what your team member is doing. Too often, you’ll see a supervisor who has little knowledge of even the high level details of what their team members are working on. This is the trap that I think many new and experienced supervisors alike fall into, and here are three common reasons why this happens:

• Trust and Competence - Once you start trusting in someone’s ability, it becomes easier and easier to just let them do more and more of the work. This is fine, however eventually it becomes easy to end up assigning them a task you receive and never check up on the details of their work. If the end result is good quality, why do you care? You care because what if you have to present the results (which is most likely the case) and you get questions? What if your client questions you? You need at least a high level understanding of what’s going on to be able to handle these kinds of things.

• Busy Schedule - This is another common problem: When your schedule fills up and you have to delegate many tasks without having the time to really learn anything about them. You end up falling into the same trap as the point above. Even worse, you are not always assured of the end product because maybe you had to give someone a task that you would not have had you more time to think about it. The end result is that not only do you not know what’s going on, but neither do they.

• Lack of Knowledge - If you don’t have a clue as to what a task entails, you shouldn’t be delegating it. I know this sounds backwards, but think of it this way: If you don’t have a clue, where can the person you’re supervising go for questions? Also, how do you expect to present this information or answer client questions? You don’t have to be an expert, but you should be able to at least understand the high level details of what’s going on and have a list of people you can refer more detailed questions to.

The point is not to say that you need to be deep into the details of what’s going on with each of your team members, far from it. However, a good check to see if you know enough about what’s going on is to see if you could present a high level overview of the task you are delegating. If you can, then you’re good to go. If not, you should re-evaluate how that task should be accomplished.

This is a tad off topic, but I can’t resist. If you’re looking for a good 5 minute distraction from what you’re working on and you’re a sports fan, I recommend taking a look at The Sports Guy’s articles, a.k.a Bill Simmons. This guy is hilarious and writes funny but informative articles on a bunch of different sports and topics. I always start off my day checking to see if he has written a new article.