IMAGINE you're in first class en route to your favourite faraway island with the person of your dreams, or your spouse, beside you relaxing with a book. The mild turbulence goes unnoticed by everyone else but somehow the fine wines and fun ahead are ruined for you. You're focused intently on the bumpy ride and can't help wondering if the captain's coping alright. Shouldn't he take us up a notch above that cloud cluster? Better stay alert and keep an eye just so nothing goes awry. It becomes one very long, stressful flight.

A similar eagerness to intervene overcomes you on the odd occasions when you find yourself in the passenger seat of the family car while someone else drives. Fighting the urge to take the wheel, you wonder how your loved ones manage to avoid major crashes the way they brake early, indicate late and don't use the wing mirror nearly enough.

And no other diner revels as you do when after the social gathering you are tasked with sorting out the bill and ordering the cabs. If your thoughts are constantly flung in the direction of the potential disaster other people's inadequate behaviour might bring about, it may not just be a case of other people messing up.

Although the impulse to intervene takes hold across many different situations, for much of the time nothing bad happens and, surprisingly, nobody ever asks you to take over.

People are motivated to view themselves as favourably as possible and to appraise the situations they come up against in line with their central self views. Therefore, they tend to seek and accept information which feeds into and bolsters often warped and unhealthy world views picked up . . . unknowingly . . . under different and more chaotic circumstances.

Back in school, perhaps.

It's quite possible . . . in the self-serving redistribution of detail we carry out after unnerving encounters with other people's behaviour . . . to arrive at the conclusion that other people aren't as competent at executing most tasks as we are.

But a more precise if unpalatable explanation may just be that we all, given half a chance to express it, just love control and want to hang onto it once we've tasted its heady delights.

Control is inextricably linked to trust. We surrender control on the rollercoaster only because, although we love the fear and thrill we get during the ride, we trust the engineers who assembled and designed the structure. If we don't trust the person next to us, the computers around us, the systems we operate within, the natural urge for many is to seek sanctuary in controlling behaviour, overt or covert, helpful or unhelpful, just to get us through the fear factor.

It's this lack of trust and urge for control, born out of fear, that makes for one of the more havoc-wreaking habits of managers at work today.

Accumulated evidence about good management supports the notion that giving up control and letting go of the urge to take over or at least intervene every few hours or days or weeks results in better quality and higher quantity of work output.

And yet many managers see their role as a controlling one and view themselves as ultimately in charge of the way their staff do what they're supposed to do.

This makes for bad delegates and frustrated staff. It means managers are wasting time looking over shoulders and those well able to manage their own projects are hampered by interference.

Managing is about making the need for a manager redundant so that people are able to get on with the job and deliver the results . . . and be judged by them. Fear makes managers intervene and the main reason appears to be that managers know they have not developed and motivated staff properly and so feel they can't . . . and maybe they truly can't . . . trust their staff to deliver.

The better remedy for this is to start with trust and take the responsibility as a manger of allowing staff to prove their worth, or not. And bask . . . or not . . . in the reflected glory.

Without regular and properly executed delegation the quality of the work done is compromised. The best managers concentrate on motivating and assisting their staff to be better, independently of them.

ASK PATRICIA. . .

Q I am a manager of 15 people who operate across two different functional areas. In 360 feedbacks in January I was told I wasn't delegating enough.

I feel I haven't time to delegate and people have to use their own initiative but am not sure how to remedy the situation.

A It sounds as though you don't really understand what delegation is. It's not doling out work, dumping lower-end tasks or even just sharing assignments.

Delegation is about handing over a task and giving guidance on certain requirements you have and then leaving the delegate with some freedom to execute it in their own way. Not in your way.

Identifying clearly what you want done "rst is crucial, not expecting mind readers.

An appropriately quali"ed person has to be given the task, so that they are trustworthy in terms of abilities/competencies. Giving clear instructions in terms of overall aims and objectives and the timeframe, resources and review dates as well as a description of the end product is necessary.

One of the key elements in effective delegation is, once you have gone through the above, to get the person to repeat back to you what exactly it is that you've asked them to do, so that everybody is completely clear what you want and when. Then . . .apart from a pre-arranged review meeting . . . let them at it.

Judge the end result. Theirs and yours. Did you delegate? Did they execute?