Delegate Delegation — An Upgrade to the Common Delegation Practice of Micro Management
Many managers (and individuals) assume that load balancing their team members is the manager's job. That's a pretty bad idea. And I'll explain why.
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 specific leadership advice.
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First, this article isn’t just for people managers. Delegation is a two-way street. Which is already a metaphor, but that’s not good enough for me. I’ll add a few more.
Delegation takes two to tango.
Delegation is like a fist fight. Doing it all by yourself doesn’t really work.
Delegation is like playing catch. You need both throwing and catching, or else you’ll look goofy.
Ok. Now that I’ve had a little fun, my point is that understanding delegation load balancing isn’t just a job for the manager. In fact, a big part of my point is that handling delegation well is absolutely a job for both people involved.
I’ve probably worked extensively with over 100 people managers, and lightly with hundreds more. The vast majority of them were decent humans. They sincerely wanted the people on their teams to grow their careers, enjoy their time, and avoid overwork. Sure, there were a couple of people who seemed to be cliché heartless jerks, but they were very few and far between.
Delegation is a core tool for managers. If we made a list of the 3 major tools managers use, it’s probably something like “delegating”, “giving feedback”, and “setting direction”. Actually, I just made that list up, but it feels approximately right to me.
I read this great book years ago at the prompting of one of my managers (Stefan Haney) about delegation called the One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. I won’t get into it because how to delegate isn’t the purpose of this article. But I will say that it was possibly the most career changing book I’ve read. So if you haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend it. It’s short.
Considering delegation is a core tool of managers, it’s shocking how often I observed managers working extremely long days. I’d see them filling in for their team members instead of doing their management job. They’d beat themselves up, and then complain about burnout.
I’m a person who has a tough time minding my own business, plus I felt it was my job as a relatively senior leader at Amazon. So I frequently would ask people why, from the outside, they look bad at delegating.
The answer was almost always the same. They were sensitive to the amount of work their team members had.
These managers repeatedly said that they were pretty sure that their team members were already busy, so the manager stepped in to take up the slack. Then they would ask for advice. Probably because I clearly had enough spare time to nose myself into their business, and didn’t look stressed at all.
You, as reader, get to benefit from these conversations. And I think this topic is critical. Both from the employee perspective, and the management one. Because how you give away work (or receive it), and how you manage your time, are both critical to being successful in the long run.
Let’s get into the main topic.
How does a manager decide how much work to delegate?
I’d argue that a manager has two basic choices for how they load balance their teams.
The manager can load balance their team members, using whatever data they can gather about how busy their team members are. This allows them to decide who on the team has the bandwidth to do more work.
The manager can let / require their team members to load balance themselves, using their personal data to decide if they have bandwidth to do more work.
Spoiler alert. It’s likely that individuals on a team know more about their own ability to take on more work than their manager ever will.
If a manager does decide, as many managers do, to balance the workload across their team members, here are the types of things they would need to balance:
Is every one of my team members currently busy with critical work? Is anyone working on something completely optional?
Is this new work more important to the business than the work that anyone on my team is doing?
Do the team members who are working on less critical work have the skill and interest to do this new work?
Do any of my team members at least have the spare time to look at this work to estimate how hard it will be?
Are any of my team members currently (or will become) blocked on progress on their main project, so they could spare some time to work on this new work?
Trying to manage people’s time, when they’re doing complex creative knowledge work is incredibly hard. And yet, many managers try it, and usually fail.
Alternatively, a manager can delegate the load balancing. Instead of doing personal heroics to load balance their teams, they can delegate the load balancing of the work.
In this way, not only is the work being done by someone on their team, but deciding who can do the work is also done by someone else. The person who knows the most about who has the time, interest, and capability of doing said work.