The Importance of Delegating

I’ve had the opportunity to serve in leadership roles in several student organizations. The trap I’ve seen leaders (myself included) is the severe lack of delegating tasks. For many student leaders, leadership and management is a very difficult task. The same leaders, however, will often be very invested in the particular group that they’re leading: the usual case is that there is no pay motivating such leaders. For those leaders, I can offer this piece of advice - learn how to properly delegate to your members.

The IEEE Student Branch at UH Manoa (which is the student organization I currently run) has a special place in my heart since many of the previous officers really helped me when I started my academic journey. So yes, I am in fact very invested in making the club something better that can give more students the benefits that I did while I was around the previous officers. So sometimes in fear of losing achieving that goal, I accidentally put a disproportionate amount of work on my own shoulders. This does NOT work.

If you’ve been exposed to any sort of engineering related concepts, you’ll realize quickly enough that you NEED to work together to create something that is bigger than the whole. Sure the costs of communication between the group starts to climb, but as a whole, you can create something that is much more than one single person in this case. Student leaders, especially in-experienced ones, need to realize this and come to embrace delegating their tasks.

It may be hard to face at first, but delegating will only help your organization in the long run. For leaders who are very invested but in-experienced, this is a hard pill to swallow. Almost like a parent letting their child go to school alone for the first time, a leader needs to let his/her organization run it’s natural course. Corrections, suggestions and delegations can be made along the way, but the other student leaders also need a chance to contribute the whole.

Trust me, learn to delegate and you’ll feel so much better about things.