SEM 07: Level Up Your Delegation Skills
A system for effectively delegating work to other people.
Without a doubt, delegation is the thing I struggled with most as a new manager. I made every mistake you can think of. As a new manager, I constantly did work I should have been delegating because I feared delegation.
For anyone in a leadership or management position, a key part of your job is prioritising and delegating work. However, most managers struggle with effective delegation, and fear keeps them from truly delegating.
If you don’t delegate as a manager - you will eventually fail, and your career growth will be limited. Without delegating, you will take on more work than you can handle, burn out, build ineffective teams, deprive your team of opportunities, and fail to do the higher-leverage work that only a manager can do.
Delegation is a true win-win for you and your team. When you delegate well, everyone benefits. When you don’t delegate, everyone loses.
Fortunately, this week’s newsletter will cover a reliable systemic process you can follow to delegate effectively.
Let’s explore.
If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.
John C. Maxwell
Building Your Mindset For Delegation
The most difficult transition for leaders is the shift from doing to leading. Even experienced leaders can fall into the trap of doing too many things themselves because delegation can feel unnatural.
Doing work yourself feels good. It gives you a dopamine rush. It gives you an identity. You get a sense of accomplishment when you complete a task. Maybe you just love doing the work.
But you're not managing or leading if you do the work yourself.
When done well, delegation enables your team members to grow and develop their careers. It enables them to do their best work. It enables you to have more impact as a manager by focussing on higher leverage work.
Delegation is
An essential part of your job as a manager
Leverage
The best way to grow and develop people
Necessary to master if you want to scale as a leader
Fear Prevents Us From Delegating
If delegation is so important and beneficial - why do managers struggle with delegation or avoid it?
The answer is fear. The fear around delegation will be especially strong if you’ve previously been a high-performing IC.
To become an effective delegator, you need a positive mindset around delegation and understand why fear prevents you from delegating fully. Awareness is the first step.
Here are the most common failures that prevent managers from delegating.
Fear Of Failure
You fear the person you delegate to will fail to complete the task. If the person you delegate to can’t do the work on time and to the right standard, you will fail. When you delegate, you have less control over the work. To delegate effectively, you must allow your team to make mistakes occasionally. With adequate time, support, and trust, your team will succeed more often than they fail.
Fear Of Becoming Obsolete
Delegating your work to someone else can make you feel like you’re no longer important. “If they are doing the work I used to do, how am I adding value?”
The truth is that delegation frees you up to do more impactful, higher-leverage work only you can do. You can’t do the important higher-leverage work if you’re too busy doing everyone else’s work.
Fear Of Delay
You're under pressure to get the work done. You think it would be quicker to do the work yourself and slower if you delegate it. Sometimes this is true. But, in the long run, you’re better off taking longer to build your team's effectiveness and ability to handle the work.
Fear Of Losing Control
You worry that the work won’t be done as you want. When you delegate work, you lose control over how the task is done. This is especially difficult for perfectionists who take great pride in their work.
Fear of status loss
You’re an experienced expert who thinks you can do the work better than everyone else. When you delegate the work, you’ll no longer be the expert.
Fear of overloading your team
A common reason to avoid delegation is not wanting to overload or overburden your team. It’s important to realise that your team “want” to be doing important work.
If your team has too many competing priorities and commitments, you must make prioritisation decisions and decide what is most important. You can’t do everything. Failure to prioritise is not a reason for avoiding delegation.
Do you recognise any of these fears?
When you understand and recognise the fears that hold you back, you have a better chance of letting go and overcoming them.
Delegation System ⚙️
Here’s my system for delegating work. While you might not follow this exactly for every task, it’s a good checklist that you can use to make sure you’re doing things right. Over time, this will become automatic.
Step #1: Clarify
The first step of delegation is clarifying what you want to delegate. Is it a task, project, goal, or responsibility? When we think of delegating, we might think purely of tasks. But you can also delegate projects, goals (“increase sales by 50%”) or responsibility (“I want you to run our global compliance program”).
The more advanced and senior the person you are delegating to, the more you’ll want to delegate full accountability. Leave some room for creativity and independent thinking when delegating.
In addition to figuring out what to delegate, you must ensure you have the context and details that someone you’re delegating to needs - the “why”.
Nothing is more frustrating than being given a task but not being told “why” the work is important or not being given important context that would have made doing the task much easier. So, set people up for success by giving them ALL the necessary information.
Step #2: Decide
Deciding who to delegate to will depend on the time pressure and impact of the task. For example, if you have a small task without time pressure, you could delegate it to one of your junior engineers to help them learn and grow. However, delegating to a senior who is more likely to finish the work on time might make sense if you have a task with a lot of external pressure.
Don’t delegate high visibility, time-pressured tasks to inexperienced people, as you will set them up for failure. However, don’t give all your tasks to your seniors, or you’ll burn them out and prevent juniors from growing and learning.
Step #3: Communicate A Deadline 📆
I’ve been given a task with a “hidden” deadline a few times in my career. This means my manager asked me to do something but didn’t say when it should be done. At the last minute, I’d get a panicked message: “We need this done by the end of the day”.
Don’t surprise people.
All work should have a deadline associated with it. The more specific and detailed, the better. Spell out if the work needs to be done by a specific date or time.
Example: “I need you to do X so that Y. We need to finish it by 4 pm on Friday. I’ve scheduled a review for 1 pm Friday. Is that OK?”
Step #4: Secure Commitment
Just because you want to delegate work to someone doesn’t mean they have the capacity or willingness to do it.
There have been times in my career when someone tried to delegate a task to me, but I could not do the work due to other priorities. Worse still, I hadn’t explicitly agreed to do the work, resulting in misunderstandings and missed deadlines.
Some people will explicitly say “no” right away. But others might say nothing and not fully commit to doing the work. This is the worst possible situation since you assume that you’ve delegated and the work will be done, but in reality, the person you delegated to never actually agreed to do the work. When the deadline comes, and you ask, “Did you get this done?” and they say, “No”, it’s on you for not getting an explicit commitment.
To avoid these misunderstandings, ensure you get agreement from the person you’re delegating to. You may need to help a person reprioritise their work. If the person you first choose to delegate a task to is unavailable, you need to find someone else.
Ensure you get a commitment. If there isn’t capacity, find someone else or renegotiate and reprioritise existing work.
Step #5: Set Clear Expectations
Surface hidden expectations. Don’t assume people know how you want the work to be done. Everyone has unstated preferences about how they think work should be done and what level of effort something requires.
In addition to setting expectations about how the work should be done, you should set expectations about how the work will be monitored and what to do if things aren’t going to plan.
You want to know immediately if something is going wrong. But you don’t want to be checking in all the time. Set escalation criteria so people know when and how to inform you about problems. Act as an exception handler and tell people when and how to contact you if they need support.
Often, managers need to be informed about the state of a project so they can report upward to their managers. If you need regular updates on the work, make that clear.
Step #6: Monitor
Trust, but verify - Russian proverb
You remain accountable for the work's success when you delegate a task, so you’ll need a way to monitor and review the status of your delegated work. Just because someone else is doing the work doesn’t mean your boss won’t be chasing “you” for updates.
Set up a review process or follow-up to ensure the goals are met. This might be a scheduled weekly call, a daily standup meeting, or an offline weekly report to review progress and provide feedback.
Delegation Mistakes To Avoid
There are a few common traps you will want to avoid when delegating. Here are the common ones.
Mistake #1: Micromanaging
Doing other people’s work and taking control is a fast way to break trust and undermine the confidence of those who work for you. Although getting involved is tempting, resist the urge and provide feedback instead.
Mistake #2: Being A Hero
If a task isn’t going quite to plan, jumping in and saving the day can be tempting. If you’re an experienced leader, you could take over to get things back on track. It will probably make you feel good about yourself and feel like you’re being helpful.
But when you step in and become the hero, you take away ownership from your team, and you undermine their confidence and accountability.
Avoid being the hero.
Mistake #3: Abdicating Accountability
You can delegate authority and responsibility, but you cannot delegate accountability. Accountability means owning the outcome of the work. When you delegate work to someone else, you remain accountable for it.
You are still responsible if the task goes wrong or doesn’t get done. It’s on you.
Mistake #4: Delegating Work You Should Do
Some work is the job of a manager. You shouldn’t delegate work that is your responsibility. For example, you wouldn’t delegate holiday request approvals to your team. Some things can’t be delegated.
Delegate the work best suited for other people and do only the work you’re uniquely able to do.
Summary
Become more rigorous in your approach to delegation and use this simple system to level up your delegation skills.
Prepare To Delegate
Clarify what and why
Decide who should do the work
Clarify the deadline
Delegate the work
Secure commitment
Set clear expectations
Review and monitor
When you become a better delegator, you increase the probability that your people will succeed, and you free up time to work on higher-leverage work that only you can do.
Thanks for reading.
Get in touch
Thanks for reading. If you want to talk about engineering management, I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me directly and connect on LinkedIn or via my Website.