4 Steps to Delegate (Give Away) Your Work—And Become a Better Leader
Delegation isn’t just about doing less. It’s about getting the work done—and helping others grow in the process.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.
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Let me start with storytime. Because storytime is the most fun writing.
Bridget admitted to me that she was stressed. This came because I asked her why she looked stressed, and she said it was because she was stressed. Makes sense.
She managed one of my teams and felt overworked. She had meetings literally all day without breaks. That only left the time before or after her workday to complete her personal work. This felt familiar to me because I’d been there many times in the past.
I offered to help.
She agreed, and we opened up her calendar.
"How about you let your senior engineer lead this design review meeting?" I said, pointing at an hour meeting later in the day.
"No, they're already busy with their own work, so I need to carry some of the load." she replied.
I scanned for the next obvious calendar item. "Then perhaps the weekly project review meeting, you could send your project manager and skip it."
She shook her head. "No, they're not experienced enough yet to be trusted solo. I need to be there to help for now."
I frowned, but continued. "What about this bug triage meeting? Surely the engineers could do it without you?"
She shook her head again, which was becoming a pattern. "They like having me set the priorities on the tasks, so it's better if I attend. The meeting is more effective if I’m there."
This was not a workload issue. Because in these types of jobs, there’s an infinite amount of work to do. You’re never done; you just decide that you’ve done enough at some point.
Instead, this was a clear delegation problem. Bridget, like many other high-achieving employees, had a hard time letting go of tasks. She felt the need to help others with their workload; she thought her team members weren't experienced enough to lead on their own, and her team felt comfortable delegating work back to her.
This is not just about management. Every person who grows past an entry-level position needs to learn the skill of delegation.
The above story about Bridget? This was not a one-time thing. Between managers and senior employees, I’d see this monthly (at least) throughout my career. I think more than 50% of senior employees underdelegate or delegate poorly.
You can’t just decide to “delegate” either. Saying, “Hey Bob, can you please do this for me?” is not delegating. That’s handing off a task. Proper delegation is a skill you can learn. It takes new and uncomfortable muscles to properly offload work that we know we can complete better than our team members.
All experienced employees should be leaders in their own way. We lead the way for the more junior employees, those who are earlier in their career journey. As soon as you have a couple of years under your belt, you’ll be able to start practicing your leadership skills.
And a large part of your job as a leader is to encourage others to take ownership over new tasks and have more autonomy. Part of growth is the ability to do higher-value tasks, but that means ensuring you can help other employees grow into other tasks. Perhaps the ones you used to do.
The two reasons you need to practice delegation.
I think every single employee needs to learn the skill of delegation. While it’s a classic manager skill, every experienced employee should have this in their toolbox.
For you, we’re looking for more time and fewer things to track.
For them, we’re looking for more responsibility and autonomy.
Your time becomes more valuable over time.
You get raises and promotions, I hope. Clearly, your hourly value has increased, which means the company expects more from you.
The value of your time increases as you become more senior, gain skills, and build more institutional knowledge.
This means if you’re a VP at a company, it’s a horrific waste of time for you to check someone’s document for grammar. Yes, I’m sure you could do it. You might do it great. But surely there’s someone capable of doing it to an adequate quality level who is paid significantly less per hour.
Similarly, a principal engineer shouldn’t do the code reviews for recent college hires unless they’re doing it for the purpose of training. You want to ensure that valuable employees do the most valuable thing with their time.
The delegatee learns from delegation.
Even if you were paid the same as your co-worker, there is still value in delegating tasks.
Part of the value of every employee is the knowledge and skills they’ve built over time.
If you’re doing the same weekly task for the 7th week in a row, you’re not building new skills. This means you’re not getting more valuable for yourself or your company.
On the other hand, if your co-worker has never done the task, it may make a ton of sense for everyone involved to have them complete that task.
The task still gets done. You can do something else (perhaps something new to increase your value?). Your co-worker learns a new skill and becomes more valuable as well. It’s literally win/win/win.
The 3 reasons delegation fails.
The most common failure of delegation is a task rebounding to the delegator. If you try to delegate and end up owning the task again, it’s likely for one of the following reasons.
You (or others) worry about quality.
When tasks are delegated, they’re frequently done from an expert to a novice.
What this means is that you’re almost inevitably going to end up with a slower and/or lower quality result.
It can be daunting to accept that reality, that a task might not be done properly, or efficiently, or on the schedule you need.
At times, this worry is accurate and reasonable. Perhaps you really do need that emergency thing done by this Friday, so you need the expert to work on it. That’s fine.
But most times, it’s a simple human aversion to reduced quality. The downside to reduced quality is frequently small or nothing.
80% quality with 100% autonomy from a novice is usually (much) better than 100% quality from the expert.
You think the other person is too busy.
This is the pitfall for a manager with a bit too much empathy. You’d think that a kind and thoughtful manager would be the best one.
Except I repeatedly ran into these lovely, nice managers who hated to load up their employees, so they kept so much work to themselves.
A team member says they’re a bit busy. So the manager feels bad asking them to do anything else.
Or perhaps the manager noticed that they were working after hours. Which they noticed, coincidentally, because they were also there after hours.
No one likes being the cause of someone else having a worse day. This means leaders with empathy frequently make the mistake of loading themselves up instead of helping their team members learn how to balance and prioritize their work.
The next step of the task ends up delegated back to you.
“Come back and review that email with me before sending.”
You just delegated the next step back onto yourself. So you really didn’t delegate any ownership. You’ve just asked them to do a task.
“I’ll think about what we should do and get back to you.”
Even worse, you delegated a task to yourself without a clear next step, and the other person has nothing to do.
“I’ll send you the document, and you can let me know if it looks good before I do anything else.”
They just delegated the next step of their task to you.
I’m not saying that you should be uninvolved. But there are ways to be involved where you don’t take back ownership of the next step. Ok moving on to the 4 steps.