Delegate Effectively

Posted on January 20, 2009

Hilda M. Pantin (bio) asserts that even early career researchers must learn to delegate.


This is a very important thing, I think, for young people to learn is how to manage if they're going to be in any kind of a management role.

One of the things that I work very, very hard with my junior faculty is to teach them to delegate, and this is a problem that is across the board because if you're very confident, you're used to doing things yourself, then it's really usually much easier and much faster just to do it than it is to train someone else and to supervise them and to monitor them so that they can do the work.

In the long run, though, the people who wind up really being able to be productive are those who can delegate effectively, so I encourage young faculty members to learn to delegate and to delegate those things that someone else can do so that they can focus on the things that only they can do.

So on our team we have people at multiple levels. We have a lot of volunteers who work with us, and we have a lot of graduate students who work with us. And they learn how to do analyses and how to do lit reviews and how to write papers.

And so we work as a team, and we have, everybody contributes according to their ability at that point in time. And as people move forward and as they grow in terms of experience and ability, then they progress to take on bigger and bigger responsibilities.

And I really think this is very important and something that the young faculty who work with me get a lot of training on how to do this effectively: how to delegate, how to monitor, how to supervise, and how to keep, how to empower people who work with you to be able to develop their own skills and abilities.

Viewing Preferences

Downloads


Excerpted from an interview with researcher at the 2008 National Hispanic Science Network on Drug Abuse Conference in Bethesda, MD.

Conference dissemination services provided by Interlink.

 

More About "Career Advancement"

 

More From Hilda M. Pantin (bio)