Learning to Delegate: Why and How?

Trust, expertise and interpersonal skills… Delegation requires mastering competencies that are far from innate; it demands rigor and flexibility that often increase the workload and mental burden on managers. Like many management practices, it also tends to be absent from media industry training programs. Yet when delegation is properly implemented, every stakeholder benefits: leaders, team members, and the organization itself.

Ensure the viability of your media

Having a long-term strategic vision is too often seen as incompatible with getting daily tasks done. Yet a production model based on immediacy has very little chance of being viable. Completing missions in silos will only have a positive effect in the short term: the risks would be isolation at work, lack of role models, people burning out, others feeling powerless… Employee disengagement, in short! Delegating is, by contrast, a way to optimize production over the long term. Whether it's to be able to step back from a task, manage the unexpected, and leave with peace of mind (illness, time off…), it's essential to limit irreplaceable people. So, how do you do it?

Improve the team integration experience

Got a new team member? You can set up a welcome guide that provides access to the company's tools, methods, practices, and values. At Médianes, we bring all of this together in a kit that includes team biographies, an overview of our organization, and our editorial and ethics charter. This gives everyone a shared foundation.

Bringing someone on board for a new project? First, the project needs to be ready to delegate. Next, take a step back and think about how you usually manage and complete similar tasks. By explaining the context and acting as a guide when handing the work off to a colleague, you'll give them the tools to succeed. By sharing in writing the best practices to follow, the project steps, resources (case studies, tutorials, tools used), and mission details (deadlines, general context, priorities, deliverables), you make the task easier to complete. Those 15 minutes you invest now will save you many more later! Stepping back from your usual work to describe and pass it on to others will also help you identify procedures and methods that need to be reviewed.

Centralize information

Centralizing information on a single collaborative platform and facilitating note-taking at each meeting with automatic transcription software can save you valuable time and foster everyone's independence. We recommend limiting private exchanges in favor of public conversations: this way all team members can access the practices, draw inspiration from them, and integrate them into their own workflows.

Ensure follow-up

You can structure the delegation phase in steps: start by scheduling a check-in to give your colleague a deadline. This is a way to show them the timeframe you consider necessary to complete the task. Observe how this first step went and draw your conclusions: is another check-in needed? Do you feel the person is capable of handling the assignment independently? The idea is not to abandon the person you're delegating to, but rather to intervene only when and where it's truly useful: create the conditions for them to need you as little as possible! Scheduling check-ins to begin with is a way to provide reassurance initially, set boundaries, and ultimately empower the person.

Build a lasting team

Delegating is also a way to retain your team members and engage your talent in projects where they feel valued and can develop their skills. Here are a few tips to help you.

Identify what's important

Ask yourself what seems important to you in order to feel confident. What skill or behavior are you looking for as a priority? What criterion or criteria does a well-executed task or successful project depend on? At Médianes, it is first and foremost rigor that is a condition for trust — and trust, a condition for rigor. We are attentive, for example, to details (such as formatting), to ensuring that everyone shares their progress on a task. Of course, it's up to you to know what your own criteria are!

Develop a learning culture…

Allowing employees' responsibilities to evolve and grow with them will give them confidence in their abilities, in their ideas, and can motivate them to stay. Three conditions define this culture: ambition, acceptance of failure, and autonomy. In practice, this means giving everyone the opportunity to learn from their experiences and remain in constant learning. Companies such as Etsy bring this vision to life by establishing "internal schools" and regularly analyzing successes and failures, allowing everyone to learn from common mistakes. This approach, built on trust and good faith in individuals, facilitates more effective and harmonious delegation on both sides.

…To make the members of your team accountable

If you are a leader or manager, we invite you to dedicate time to supporting your team members. The idea is for each person to become responsible for their area, to have full authority over their task or mission: this is the culture of subsidiarity. Empowering team members also means creating a space where everyone can share their perspective and ideas: the goal is for each person to feel they belong to the collective and have a voice.

Think of yourself

There are your teams, but there is also you. Delegating well is certainly a way to lighten your own workload, but also to see that the vision you carry is spreading throughout your team. Beyond generating a sense of satisfaction, there is real pleasure in seeing your team members grow and seeing that the project engages them.

Step back

Learning to delegate is also (and especially!) learning to surround yourself with others and include them in your project, whatever its size (entrepreneurial venture, specific task, etc.). This is undoubtedly a way to step back, because you should always remember that your own vision is not necessarily the best one; and you won't discover anything else if you go it alone. Beyond being a beautiful exercise in humility, the practice of delegation promotes healthy management. Why does this matter?

Nourish yourself and question your practice

When you delegate, you can see the differences between your practices and those of the person you've entrusted with the task. Ask yourself what you would have done differently: is it really necessary? desirable? a priority? Similarly, ask yourself what your colleague did differently and what you could learn from! A person with fresh eyes might find different and perhaps more efficient ways of doing what you've been doing automatically for a long time. Delegation is not simply about transferring responsibilities. It also involves stepping outside your comfort zone and reconsidering what each person is capable of doing.

Knowing how to respond to someone else's need, not just your own

In mastering delegation, one point seems essential to us: accepting that there are things in the personal or even intimate sphere that cannot be delegated. Whether it's the place a project occupies in daily life, commitment to the company… There are convictions that are unique to each individual, and that cannot be directly delegated.

Accept giving up control

Many people are hesitant about delegating. The reasons include fear of wasting time or the work being done poorly. This stems from a false belief that no one else can accomplish the task as well as you can. Fundamentally, it's a fear of losing control. However, delegating a task while requiring it to be done exactly as you would do it limits the pool of people you could ask to do the work. By adopting a more open approach and accepting other methods, you open up new possibilities.

What next?

We recognize that when faced with the reality of your project, this program may have its limitations. At Médianes, we see this ourselves. While we work to enable everyone to gain autonomy, responsibility, and skills at the same time, we haven't yet succeeded in systematically integrating this into practice. Part of our team remains irreplaceable, some still struggle to delegate matters, sometimes by convention, sometimes by ego. We remain attentive to these dysfunctions; the internal reorganization we began in September 2023 is our first attempt to address this. Naturally, we also remember that we're not running a sprint: building Médianes happens step by step, through testing, making mistakes, and trying to correct course. It takes time, it's imperfect and sometimes difficult, but we believe this iterative approach is necessary to build a viable and virtuous project.

To go further:

• Éric Fottorino (Le 1), Johan Weisz (StreetPress), Juliette Quef (Vert) and Florent Peiffer (URBANIA France)… Their insights from the launch event for our book "Creating a Media Outlet".
• How can you manage projects effectively within your newsroom? That's the central question we attempt to answer in this guide.
• Establish procedures, monitor projects and employees, listen carefully… Learn all about our management practices.
• What does a typical day, week, month, or year look like at Médianes? Some answers.
• Whether it's for organizing our meetings or sharing our tools, discover the experience sharing from the Médianes team.
• Management, transformation, scaling, audience engagement, editorial and economic innovations: in the second season of our podcast Chemins, we host six media founders and leaders sharing strategies and best practices for sustainable growth.