Delegation
I’ve written about how my experience studying systems science at Binghamton University has exposed gaps in my skills around organization and documentation. This past Friday my group submitted the final presentation for our black box assignment which makes up 60% of our grade. Reflecting on my experience working on the project has made me very conscious of a third skill I’m eager to refine.
Delegation, which Wikipedia defines as as “the process of distributing and entrusting work to another person.”
I’ve always shied away from taking the lead in group projects for school, but fate led to me being placed in a group where embracing the leadership mantle was logical. I was the only one who had seen this type of simulation before and had an intuition for how to start reasoning about it. I was also the most comfortable with the type of coding necessary to help us to analyze its behavior.
But I didn’t know how to effectively delegate, which meant I wasn’t able to empower everyone to contribute to the best of their ability.
How do I effectively share my knowledge, experience, and thought processes with people from very different academic backgrounds and with diverse skillsets?
How do I teach and guide teammates who are eager to contribute but aren’t sure where to start?
What emotional considerations do I need to account for? What does it mean to inspire, to motivate, and to give effective feedback?
I’m proud of the efforts we made. And given our solid performance on the first part of the assignment, I’m optimistic about our final grade. But I feel sad that the sense of curiosity and fun I felt when we first received the assignment gradually gave way to stress and anxiety as I bumped up against the limitations in my leadership skills.
I feel confident in my ability to hone my organizational skills and get better at documentation. But delegation feels trickier. I’ll be doing my own research on the topic, but I sense that this is an area where having conversations with experienced leaders will provide significant value.
If any readers have resources or general tips on the topic of delegation, I’d love to hear them!