Delegation

Now that we’ve gotten our strategies for communicating well with our staff sorted, we’ll look at one of the most powerful tools that you have as a manager: delegation. Remember that as an engineer, you write the code and delegate the work to computers all the time. Being an effective manager involves learning how to do this with people. We’ll show you how.

Simply put, delegation is the transfer of responsibility for a task from yourself to a direct report. For example, if you’ve been asked to produce a report, then you can delegate that task to somebody on your team, and then when the work is finished, it can be given to the person that asked for it. All the while you can be doing something else. That’s delegation. It sounds simple, right? Well, it is. It’s not rocket science. However, a number of nuances with delegation make it difficult to master. But with a simple framework, you too can become an expert delegator.

Bad Delegation: The Two Extremes

To illustrate why delegation is important, let’s look at two common symptoms of managers that are unable to delegate properly. You may have observed these behaviors in other managers you have worked with, or if you’ve been a manager before, then you may have even observed them in yourself.

The first common symptom is what happens when managers are unable to delegate at all. Have you ever observed a manager who always seems to be in a flurry of stress and busyness, with a whirlwind flying around them as they struggle to do just one of the 600 things they need to get done? All the while, their team is underworked or even idle. This is a symptom of not delegating enough and can happen for a few reasons. One is that in an industry where strong individual contributors often get promoted into management roles, they’re unable to make the transition from doing all of the most important and critical work themselves to delegating it all to their team and giving them the mentorship and support they need in doing those tasks. I’ve worked with managers who are like this. As hard as they try, they inevitably do work to a poorer quality, subject themselves to a higher amount of stress and frustration, and ultimately their team suffers because they feel untrusted to do the important work. You don’t want to be like this: that’s why you need to learn how to delegate, and to delegate well.

The second common symptom is the inverse of the previous situation. The opposite of not delegating at all is to fire and forget. A manager gives a task to a member of their team and then completely forgets that it exists. This means that the manager is completely unaware of whether the task gets done or not, and to what quality. In the best case it may be done extremely well, but in the worst case it doesn’t get done at all. What often happens is that it gets done not quite right, to a level of quality that isn’t quite good enough, to the wrong deadline. This harms both the manager, who didn’t get the work delivered, and the staff member, who didn’t get the support and guidance that they needed to succeed.

If you’ve been working in industry for a while, you’ve probably seen countless examples of these two symptoms of poor delegation. It’s bad for both the manager and their staff member. However, hope isn’t lost. Learning the principle of delegation is actually very simple, and applying it isn’t too hard either. Let’s go through these principles together. They’ll help you understand why these situations occur and prevent you from making the same mistakes. With time, you’ll delegate masterfully without even needing to think about it.

You Do Not Delegate Accountability

The key to good delegation is understanding the difference between accountability and responsibility. Despite the words often being used interchangeably, there’s a subtle but important difference between them when it comes to delegation:

• If you have accountability for a task, then you are being held to account for the completion of that task to the required level of quality.

• If you have responsibility for a task, then you’re the one who is actually doing it.

We can define delegation by using these terms. Delegation is giving responsibility of a task to somebody else, while maintaining accountability for it. Sometimes it’s easier to grasp this concept by imagining the chief executive officer (CEO) of a large multinational company with thousands of employees. The CEO is ultimately accountable for everything that the company does; however, it’s impossible for CEOs to do everything themselves. No CEO is going to be a hands-on expert at finance, operations, sales, product, customer success, technology, and marketing. Therefore, the CEO employs leaders in those areas to which they delegate the running of those functions.

The CEO remains accountable for the technology of the company but delegates the responsibility for it to the chief technology officer (CTO). As we go further down the org chart, the CTO will delegate the running of various parts of their department to various vice presidents (VPs), who delegate to engineering managers, who delegate to their engineers. If one of the engineers was to maliciously leak sensitive customer data, then ultimately the CEO is accountable and will have to take corrective action accordingly. The engineer will not be the one answering the questions from the press.

Looking at the two examples of bad delegation in the previous section, we can now reason about what is wrong with them. In our first example where the manager is overwhelmed from not delegating, it’s because they are assuming accountability and responsibility for all of their tasks. The fix is to give responsibility to others and delegate. For the second situation, the manager that is firing and forgetting is giving responsibility of the task to others but is also giving away the accountability, which is wrong. This is the opposite of delegation: abdication.

The Scale of Delegation

Successful delegation comes from giving the responsibility of a task to somebody else while maintaining accountability for it. There’s an art to doing it well. We can use a scale to look at how a task should be delegated to an individual as shown in the image.

As you go from left to right on the diagram, the amount of delegation is increasing. It’s important to note that full delegation can only happen when the person being delegated to can perform that task exactly to the standard that you expect with no guidance. The scale between no delegation and full delegation involves applying the right amount of teaching, coaching, mentorship, and check-ins. That is why retaining accountability is so important: not only does it ensure that the task gets done properly, it also gives your staff a chance to learn and grow.

It’s important to remember each task is delegated individually. This means different tasks should be delegated in different ways. The reason for this is people’s expertise differs between tasks. It isn’t correct to think a junior engineer will always need careful coaching through everything and a senior engineer only needs to be told what to do. Nobody is an expert at every task, regardless of their seniority. As manager, it’s up to you to judge each task and delegate it appropriately according to the place you assign it on the scale.

Another arrow on the diagram is moving in the opposite direction: control. With more delegation comes a loss of control, which in most cases is absolutely fine. But you may find situations in which you delegate less to maintain more control. For example, a critical task may shift the amount of delegation that you do to the left because of the nature of the work. For instance, if the production environment has been broken by the latest deploy, you may check in more regularly with your senior engineer that is fixing it than you would for the same bug fix on the development environment.

Here’s the rule you need to follow: given the right mix of control you need for the task, delegate as much as you can. With time, your staff will learn more, and you can delegate more, increasing the output and effectiveness of your team.

Delegation Do’s and Don’ts

Before we wrap up, let’s have a look at some do’s and don’ts of delegation.

Do:

• Delegate. You cannot be an effective manager without delegating your work. A team of people can produce more work than one individual can. Allow them to do so.

• Delegate enough to challenge your staff. Delegation is a win-win situation, since your team can get more done and your staff get to feel challenged, learn new skills, and accomplish things together.

• Retain enough control depending on the criticality of the task. For important, highly visible work, don’t be afraid to move to the left on the scale to ensure that you’re on top of what’s going on.

Don’t:

• Abdicate. You cannot delegate without maintaining accountability for the task. If you are not accountable for the result, then you are abdicating from it.

• Expect others to work the same way as you. The more you delegate, the more likely it is that the person will approach the task differently to you. That’s absolutely fine. You should maintain accountability over outputs, not the process. Doing otherwise is not delegating: it’s micromanaging and meddling.

• Take things back. You should be delegating tasks to the correct point on the scale so that your staff either do it themselves or learn how to do it. If you’ve chosen a point on the scale that is too far to the right, then slowly move it back toward the left. Never get frustrated and do it yourself. It’s your responsibility to make the task as much of a learning opportunity as possible. Snatching it back and doing it yourself not only cheats your staff out of an opportunity to learn, but it makes them feel bad too.

Delegating the Implementation to You

That’s it—delegation is simple, right? It’s easy to learn, but tricky to master. But with continual practice, you’ll be an expert delegator if you follow the principles we’ve outlined.