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Management & Leadership vocabulary · Delegation and Accountability

Delegate

Meaning in management & leadership, with examples

/ˈdelɪɡeɪt/verbCore term

In management & leadership, delegate means: To give part of your work, responsibility or decision-making power to someone else, usually a person in your team, while still checking that the result is achieved.

In Turkish: yetki devretmek, iş devretmek, görevlendirmek

How it is used

A core skill for new managers. You delegate a task, work or authority to someone, and the noun is delegation. Managers who cannot delegate often end up overloaded and slow their team down.

Example sentences

  1. You need to delegate more; you can't approve every invoice yourself.

  2. I've delegated the weekly report to Murat, so please send your figures to him.

Common collocations

  • delegate tasks
  • delegate authority
  • delegate responsibility
  • learn to delegate
  • delegate effectively
  • authorityThe official power or right to make decisions, give instructions and use resources, usually linked to a person's role in an organisation.
  • accountabilityThe duty to answer for the result of a task or decision, which includes explaining what happened and accepting the consequences, even if others did the work.
  • empowerTo give people the authority, confidence and resources to make decisions and act on their own, instead of waiting for approval at every step.
  • micromanageTo control every small detail of other people's work, checking constantly and making decisions for them instead of trusting them to do the job.
  • RACI matrixA table that shows, for each task or decision, who is Responsible, who is Accountable, who must be Consulted and who must be Informed.

More terms: Delegation and Accountability

Practise with graded reading

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