Delegate means to give someone else the authority and responsibility to do a task that you could do yourself. When a team captain delegates jobs to different players, she might ask one person to bring the water bottles, another to set up the cones, and a third to lead warm-ups. She's still in charge, but she's sharing the work.

Good leaders learn to delegate because no one can do everything alone. A class president who tries to plan the school dance entirely by himself will get overwhelmed, but if he delegates the music selection to one committee, decorations to another, and refreshments to a third, the work gets done better and faster.

When you delegate a task, you're essentially sending that responsibility to someone you trust to handle it. Parents delegate chores to kids. Teachers delegate classroom responsibilities to students. Scientists leading big research projects delegate different experiments to team members.

Learning to delegate well means knowing which tasks to keep and which to hand off, and choosing the right people for each job. It also means trusting others to do things their own way, even if it's different from how you'd do it.

A delegate (pronounced DEL-ih-git) is also a person chosen to represent others at a meeting or convention.