I found the Japanese Udemy course How to mange your team to be very informative, so I'm going to write down some of what I learned.
The whole course was only 2 hours long, and at 1.5x or 2x speed, you would finish it during your commute, but the course has a lot of important things. It was quite informative and I highly recommend it.
This article briefly describes the motivation and overview of the course, and then presents three things I learned, in the form of a summary.
Course Overview
A common situation that people in a position to manage a team often fall into is the problem that you can do it yourself quicker.
However, this can lead to overcapacity.
Also, take a look at it from the perspective of your boss, who has promoted you to a leadership position. He or she will not expect you to run the team through your own hard work, but will expect you to run the team efficiently, thereby improving the team as a whole in a way that will scale even if you add more members in the future.
The key here is the ability to move members well, or influence people. By delegating tasks, you can utilize fully the human resources of the entire team while maintaining your own capacity appropriately. It also leads to member growth and organizational maturity.
In the course, the concepts and tips are divided into three stages: 1. "Making the decision to delegate," 2. "Eliciting decision-making," and 3. "Supporting appropriately but minimally," with fairly well organized slides and concrete examples.
Lessons
Be aware of the other person's decision-making criteria.
As something to keep in mind for everyone, you should present and provide "a sense that they are making their own choices," "a gut feeling that it will work," and "a reason why you are the one who are asked do it."
It was also mentioned that the same way of asking everyone to do something is not effective. It is effective to categorize people into four categories (rational, enthusiastic, empathetic, and factual) based on whether their decision-making speed is fast or slow, and whether the decision is based on you or the people around you, and to request work according to each of these categories.
In addition, it was mentioned that it is also important to pay attention to organizational and positional interests and relationships, and to hold on to the key players in consensus building.
To elicit decision-making, get them to think.
Ask them what they might learn through this work, or tell them something that may seem simple but is important to the larger next step.
By giving them clues to think about, you encourage independent decision-making.
Provide support at key points, not as an accompaniment.
You may have experienced the feeling of wanting to accompany someone when you receive a report on work you have entrusted to them and are not satisfied with the quality, or when you are worried that the work will not be completed on time.
However, if you are too much involved in the work, it will interfere with your own work. The key point is to give moderate advice, while thinking about how you can help the other person cope on his/her own, and to be aware that you are simultaneously developing your own ability to move and the other person's growth.
It is recommended that you take the time at the beginning to summarize the "must-have points" (the pass lines of work) in a document. This will ensure a certain degree of direction and quality at the initial draft stage, and in the process of compiling the material, requirements that even you were not clearly aware of may come to light.
In addition, to reduce the burden of periodic reporting, he recommends dividing the work in units of days (3-5 business days) during the scheduling phase, so that delays can be noticed and recovered from. This way, progress can usually be monitored only by "on schedule" and delays can be dealt with (tautology, lol).
It was also recommended that the format of the report be kept to a level that did not make people think, "This is too much trouble, so let's just say on schedule", but that the questions be reviewed periodically so that the necessary information would be properly raised. It is also important to pay attention to making sure that people feel that they will receive proper feedback after reporting or consulting with you, and that it will be to their benefit.
Final Thoughts
When I myself was a leader of a manufacturing circle at university, I had the experience of not being able to effectively utilize resources by sparing the cost of training new members to do their jobs, or not being able to reduce the workload in the end by accompanying them with a firm hand instead of providing point-by-point support, so I took the course with a real sense of what it was like.
I just started my career last month and am still at the lowest level at work, but the ability to motivate people is important for everyone, so I will try to practice and learn it little by little.