Delegate Well To Sustainably Grow Your Scope and Impact
Delegating well involves carefully fitting the best form of delegation to the project and the person. Here's what questions to ask and how to do it well.
Delegation is the art of entrusting another person with your work. To scale your impact well, you need to learn to delegate well. And how well you scale your time and impact determines whether you’ll get promoted to lead bigger and bigger teams.
Delegation can feel scary, particularly for high performers. You are giving up control and relying on the talents of another. What if the quality of work suffers? What if I don't agree with how it's done? You are now responsible and accountable for something you don’t fully control, and that can be very anxiety-inducing.
Most of us first experience being delegated to, where your manager comes to you with a task. So delegation feels impromptu, sudden, and in the moment. However, delegation for most leaders is not a spur-of-the-moment act. Delegating well requires planning, trial and error, and reflection. It is a skill that can be honed and improved over time. Great leaders may carefully consider whether and how to delegate for days before making a decision. And being able to delegate well is a critical trait of a successful leader.
Why Are You Delegating?
As a leader, always start with the why. Being clear on the why will ensure that you, the person you’re delegating to, and others involved in the project know why the delegation is happening. It also sets up the framework for what happens when the delegation goes wrong. Here are some reasons why you might delegate:
The work is in the scope of a team member
The team member is looking for a stretch project
You do not have the bandwidth for a new priority
You are looking to take on stretch projects yourself
This work does not leverage your superpower
Most of us are familiar with reasons 1, 2, and 3. Those tend to be more external nudges that we respond to — someone is asking. We often forget reasons 4 and 5: that we can delegate to give ourselves more room and capacity to move up.
Delegating more of the work that does not leverage your superpower helps you deliver more impact with less work. It follows the theory of comparative advantage in economics: A country can benefit from trade even if it is less efficient at producing everything compared to another country, as long as it focuses on producing the good for which it is least inefficient. It shows that specialization based on relative efficiency—rather than absolute efficiency—can lead to greater total output and improved global welfare. To apply to superpowers, replace country with people, and efficiency with strengths. This will make your work more enjoyable, help you be more efficient, and create an exponential accelerant in your career.
What level of delegation?
Based on the complexity of the work and the competence of the person you are delegating in the task, you will want to delegate differently.
Understand task complexity
A project that is quite complex and has many unknowns will be more tricky to delegate. When you are analyzing the complexity of a project for delegation and thinking through what might go wrong, consider these four questions:
Project definition: how controversial is this project? Do most people support and agree? Is it fairly defined and well-resourced?
Consequences of failure: what happens if the project is delayed or fails? what's the damage to you, your team, and their reputation?
Unknown unknowns: How confident are you in your understanding of the situation? Do you know fairly well what needs to be done or are there a lot of areas that need to be figured out?
Best case scenario: What does delegating this project allow you to spend time on? What additional impact might this have on the team?
A well-defined project with clear resourcing and few unknowns will be more straightforward to delegate. A project that has a high risk of failure and many unknowns will require a higher skill set for the person or more oversight from you.
Competence
This leads us to the second half of the coin: the person you are delegating to. It’s important to consider the following factors about the person you are delegating to:
Technical expertise: What technical skill set is required here? Does the person have these skills?
Interest-level: How excited are they to take on the project? Are they motivated by this type of work?
Capacity: How much bandwidth do they have? What other high-priority work are they tasked with at the moment?
Similar to past projects: Have they done similar projects before? How did they go? What went well? What were the gaps?
Interestingly, I’ve found that interest level and capacity matter much more than expertise. If you have a high potential, ambitious individual, it matters less whether they’ve done the exact work so long as they are motivated to learn.
Putting it together — forms of delegation
Essentially, how you delegate should vary based on the complexity of the task, and the competence of the team member. For example, if the task is straightforward and the person knows it well, then fully delegating the task and letting them "run with it" is the best decision. However, as the task increases in complexity or unknowns, you want to transition more to an inquiry model. High performers don't want directives for what they think they know how to do. Instead, offer support.
When there's low competence, then being more directive is required. You are teaching your team members how to do the task. Then the more complex the task, the more supportive you'll need to be to encourage them through figuring out the unknowns.
When you’ve clearly analyzed the complexity and considered the competence, fitting the best delegation model will help ensure the delegation is successful.
How To Delegate to Peers and Superiors
Did you know you could delegate to people outside your team? Many leaders don’t consider this as an option. However, learning how to delegate well to peers and your leaders is super critical to your growth as a leader. Here’s how to do it.
Delegation to peers is based on the concept of reciprocity. It should feel more like you are trading favors based on relative advantage. The primary considerations are again skillset and growth, and the best way is to make the case from their perspective. It can either be simply a trading of favors as well.
Delegation to your manager and superiors is often the most underutilized resource. Do you have a manager or leader that even offers "How can I help you?" or "Please reach out any time I can help with something."? We often don't take full advantage of these offers for support and instead, prefer to grind along ourselves.
When considering what to delegate to your manager or leader, look to their strengths and their position in the organization. These asks often revolve around giving you air cover and support in group settings, being your advocate in rooms you're not in, asking for resources from other teams, or aligning difficult stakeholders.
For many of these tasks, their level and experience allow them to get it done much faster. Or, there are certain tasks in large organizations where you do need the title and position to get it done. It's simply "above your paygrade". The better you get at quickly escalating and delegating those tasks, the more effective of a leader you will be.
3 Common Mistakes of Delegation
Mistake #1: Starting with the Who, rather than the Why and What.
Often, leaders start with who they want to delegate to, and then try to come up with projects or tasks that fit that person. This narrows your delegation possibilities immensely. Instead, start with the why and the what, then look for the who.
Mistake #2: Misreading project complexity or risk
The closer a task is to your superpower, the worse you are at judging competence. This is because you are highly competent at the job. What comes easily to you may be very difficult for others. Unless you're delegating to a person with the same strengths, your assessments of the difficulty of work and the risks will likely be optimistic. In contrast, if you're delegating to someone not within your superpower, you're likely to overestimate the complexity (especially if it's to someone who has that as a strength). In general, underestimation is worse than overestimation, so be extra careful with delegating tasks you think are "easy".
Mistake #3: believe that “doing it myself” is better than a failed delegation
Often, when faced with difficult or tricky delegations, we shy away and don’t do it. Because we fear failure. However, this often leads to the work not being done, or you being burnt out — both failure scenarios. Remember, the more you delegate, the more your team grows, and the more you can delegate. If you don’t take a risk and start delegating stretch projects, then your team will not grow, and neither will you.
That’s all folks! See you next week at 3:14 pm!
Yue
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