It’s worth learning how to delegate. It doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Managers who do their team’s tasks for them, mothers do everything for their kids (or even their partners), and anyone who ever does it themselves because "it’s quicker to do it myself than show someone else how to do it…"   need to learn to delegate.

There’s more to delegating than just lightening your own load.  Delegating means managing a large number of tasks for a team of people; the team gain a sense of ownership and responsibility for the tasks, the team leader ensures that she has the time and space to lead properly; the junior members of the team get the chance to take on some more of the "senior" responsibilities and therefore grow into the role.

Creative and co-operative delegating is even more exciting. Once you’ve built a sufficiently good team dynamic to work out the delegation together, the team can make major decisions together -Which of these opp0rtunities and ideas do we have the time, enthusiasm and resources to take on?  Who is under-or overworked, under-or over-challenged, how can the rest of us pull togheter? who would like to lead on this or that task? Whose skills are most appropriate for it? Who would like to try but has never done it before? Who would like to shadow me this time and take on the responsibility next time?

Take the time to teach and instruct clearly. Then take your hands off and trust your team to get it right. And give them a few dummy runs before you jump in and take it off them again – no-one gets everything right first time.

I’vebeen at the helm of liturgical installations and events for years and years. My natural instinct was to design and lead on whole projects, wanting to have a close hand on the sense and concept of the whole. But liturgy, by its very nature, is not the same thing as a work of art by an individual artist. Learning to create liturgical events is an therefore an interesting exercise in delegation, becuase it involves not simply giving people tasks to do, but giving people who have the capacity for it enough space to create beyond the scope of what you might do yourself. It’s taken me some years to work on this balance – of keeping a good level of creative design over liturgy, while at the same time nurturing the creative gifts of others. You identify as you go along what the skills and gifts are that people have. Some people don’t flourish with an open-ended creative brief; they need specific, clear instructions to do a job to order. Others lose interest if there is no creative space, but lack the experience to pull it off without considerable help. Others come into their own and amaze you with their hidden skills. The trick, I think, is to pace the planning according to the size and signfiicance of the event, leave allowances for people to emerge as more or less creative, more or less in need of help than you thought they were, and keep talking. The person at the helm would ideally have a lot of time to walk around and watch others’ tasks evolving, finding out whether they are "on a roll" and leaving them to it, or really stuck and needing some help. There’s been alot of talk around the Alt*worship conversation about allowing for creativity, and rightly so. But moving forward with that vision needs to involve the inclusion of people who aren’t very "creative" in a visionary, design sense, but do want to contribute all the same. To co-ordinate this kind of worship, you need to be able to encourage, delegate, instruct and take your hands off as appropriate, not just to be creative yourself.