Delegation

Those of you who follow me on twitter or facebook know that in the last 6 months I've was put in a more managerial position and in the last few weeks was promoted. My work is a little weird with the positions disconnected from your level so it is confusing. The point is that I'm getting paid more and more is expected of me now. The team I lead is suffering from success. We were so good at doing are job that now we can't stop doing it! Not even to teach new people to our team how to do the job. Basically everyone is swamped. Sound familiar?

One of the hard things that I've had to start doing is sticking my neck out to prioritize things. This is pretty scary since I could end up telling someone not to do something that I find out later was A #1 PRIORITY OMG! Fortunately everything is priority 1 my manager is flexible with prioritization. I'm trying to plot out a course of where we will be in 6 months and figure out team goals for individual development, team development and tool development. If only I could find the time!

The problem is I'm used to being a DOER. When someone comes to me with a problem or task I immediately think -- is this something I am capable of doing? Often that is about as far as I think before I start getting caught up in the planing and doing of the task at hand. I'm trying to catch myself now before I commit to anything and think about a few other questions:

1. Is this something important to our team goals? Is it something that the customer needs but is better done by someone else?
2. How important is this? What are the deadlines and how hard are they?
3. Can it be broken into pieces? Who else on my team is capable of taking on part or all of those pieces?

This leads me to the last thing I've noticed -- I need to delegate more. There is too much to do and not enough time for me to do it all! Besides I have this awesome group of people who can do my bidding! If I can learn to set priorities and pass the right things off to the right people things will improve and people will feel that while there is still more to be done then time to do, they can know that what they have done was important and is taking the team in the right direction.