You need to get better at delegating

[NatashaBoombasha]

My boss tells me this a lot in my reviews.
He also freely admits that he delegates the majority of his work.
But where does he delegate it, you might ask?

1. To me
2. To our shared assistant

So if I delegate my work, and he delegates his, that all goes to our assistant, who earns the least out of the 3 of us, and is currently working the longest hours! I just can't justify doing that, so I keep a lot of it to myself, and then he wonders why I'm staying late while he saunters off early (5 hours after arriving), and is taking extended (unpaid) leave, while the 2 of us cover. AIBU to think I'm better off sucking it up, as the last 3 assistants have all left, which left us in a worse position?

Haven’t you ever said to him “delegate to who?”

It depends what you're delegating really & to who. If it's a small business middle managers tend to give stuff to admin that a corporate wouldn't, like the odd spreadsheet & some v basic accounts stuff. If it's small stuff like entering data (financial or project codes), setting up meetings or info gathering off colleagues Internet research etc then that's fine to delegate. Getting admin to do complex budgetary & accounts spreadsheets etc is neither fair or practical: when I was a PA in huge corporate I wouldn't have had the knowledge or ability either. I was tarting up graphics & fonts on client pitches after cobbling together different people's slides, doing expenses, chasing info off colleagues, minuting meetings etc etc. The Grads would do the spreadsheet stuff under supervision of (& with) middle managers.

Yeah I've said that several times, and he just says, to our assistant "that's what she's there for", or just keep "pushing back" to the person who asks for the work.... except of course when he's the person who asks for the work.

Time to get a new job. With a team to whom you can delegate and a manager who appreciates you.

You're going to have to start telling him 'I'm delegating this piece of work back to you'. Use his words.

You delegate the smaller stuff if able, you delegate everything if you’re a lazy bastard and can’t actually be a manager

CSIblonde she's not a PA as such, she's probably got a similar level of technical skill as us, just less experienced, so can do everything we do (with a little guidance), but is probably about to have a heart attack from the volume of work she's supposed to juggle, and I'm not far off myself

My manager consistently told me to delegate for over a year. In our team there are 5 of us all on the same level, then 3 more senior people.

I asked who I should delegate to and he told me to delegate to the other team members. Told him that's not my place and he said "well I'm telling you I'm happy for you to delegate to them".

Told him he might want to tell them that as I am the youngest member of the team and they're sassy fuckers a bit sensitive about workload...

In the end I had to tell the more senior member of staff that I was too busy and she would then delegate my work to the others.

Those who complained have been made redundant since I've been on mat leave

"Thanks Boss, I really need to increase the proportion that I delegate, but cannot as we do not have enough resource to pick it up. We need another team member, or a couple of part timers."

When he gives you an instant budgetary No to that, you counter with the volume of hours he delegates to you. Make sure you can prove the number of 'delegated' hours, then make the case that unless you are Asst are working until Xpm each night, the work doesn't get done.

As a skiving early-leaving slacker, he clearly won't care about that, but he WILL care when you state that the "until Xpm each night" is unsustainable & that soon you are going to have a situation where it is impossible to complete 100% of what he delegates to you.

If that doesn't sway him, can you go over his head?

Thanks mussolini9 yeah I could say the 3 or so hours per day he doesn't do, gets added onto our day, so we'd easily each work 1.5 hours overtime minimum. Could potentially go over his head, but he's there a lot longer than I am, and is pretty good mates with our director, who basically says once the work gets done by our team (overall), it doesn't really matter who does it

Good luck x