The paradox of delegation in leadership

Devika Kapur August 2020, Webinars Leave a Comment

A big role for a leader is understanding that they can not do all the work themselves and need to be able to, after collaborating, delegate some of their workload/responsibilities to their employees, who they believe can complete the task efficiently.

There are two crucial measures/aspects of decision-making in leadership – authoritative and collaborative. If a leader is too high on authoritarian and not collaborative, the decisions will end up being made by just one individual without taking anyone else’s opinion or ideas in mind. Whereas someone who would be extremely high on collaborative and low on authoritarian would face issues with making decisions as the idea would bounce around from one committee to another and be debated over rather than get a final decision to be made, due to the inflow of different preferences being voiced. Someone who is low on both would essentially avoid decisions altogether which would result in a standstill. What we want in a leader is to be equal levels of authoritarian and collaborative, which means that they would ask for other’s opinions but would get down to making a decision about it as well.

In this video, Mr. Klaasen goes on to explain these aspects in detail, while also sharing a case study example of an individual to show the factors in play. As this is a highly debated topic, there were a few questions raised towards the end of the session. The questions were based around the messiah type of leadership styles, where different mixes of leaders would fall on the matrix and how to learn the difference between deferring and avoiding decisions.

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