What (and How) Do You Delegate?

We’re big on collaboration at ProfHacker. We write about it quite a bit. Many of us come out of the digital humanities, which as a field prizes collaboration as a virtue. But as we all know, however, collaboration is not universally so prized in the academy. In humanities fields, collaborative efforts are often viewed with suspicion—we’ve long operated on the “solitary genius” model, and still sometimes wonder “just what did you do?” when discussing a joint endeavor. In the sciences, of course, group efforts are the norm, though complicated traditions still govern how those efforts are credited in print and in promotion dossiers.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the relationship between collaboration and productivity. When collaborations work, we can accomplish more with less time and less effort, sharing the burden of a more ambitious project than any individual scholar could have shouldered individually. When collaborations break down, however, we end up wasting time with mundane organizational tasks that could better be spent doing individual work.

This summer I’m fortunate to be involved in two separate team projects, both of which include a mix of humanities scholars, computer scientists, graduate students, technical staff, and library support. For such projects to work at all, team members must be ready and willing to delegate tasks. And by ‘delegate’ I mean actually delegate: actually trust that someone else will handle the task fully and competently.

Though I’ve been working on teams like these for a while now, delegation is still hard for me. I want to handle every email, attend every meeting, debug every bug—you get the picture. I know that at the root of these impulses is ego, which is, I suspect, a common malady among academics. And I know that the teams I’m working with are full of scholars equally smart and capable as me—indeed, more so in many cases! My life is easier whenever I can hand over aspects of team projects to the team members best equipped to handle them.

So my question for ProfHacker readers is this: how do you delegate effectively in your professional life? Have you become more productive by learning to let go of some responsibility in group projects? Tell us about your groupwork in the comments.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Norman Lear Center.]