Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

in the way, or a sense of natural justice may be being 
abused. 
Having established the gap and the reason for it, you must set out 
with the jobholder to work out a plan for closing the gap. Where 
are the opportunities for improvement? How might you be able 
to help? Think of this part of the interview as joint problem 
solving. Find a course of action that the jobholder can agree to. 
Only they can behave differently, so they must decide what to do. 
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100 Improve your Communication Skills
They may be able to make substantial improvements in stages. 
Explain that you will be available to help. 
Record your agreement and don’t forget to follow up on 
agreed action. 
Delegation 
Delegation is deliberately choosing to give somebody authority to 
do something you could do yourself. It is not just ‘handing out 
work’. You give somebody a responsibility: the task to be 
performed; and you devolve authority: the power to make other 
decisions and to take action to carry out the responsibility. 
Successful delegation involves matching responsibility with 
authority. Anybody who manages will know how difficult this 
can be – as will any parent or carer. 
Preparing for the interview: working out what to 
delegate 
Review your own objectives. Now distinguish between the 
activities you can delegate and those for which you must take 
personal responsibility. Obvious candidates for delegation 
include: 
• routine tasks; 
• time-consuming tasks – research, testing, 
administrative or coordinating activities; 
• complete tasks that can be delegated as a block of work; 
• communication tasks – letters, promotional material,