Effective delegation is key to getting a team to work together and crack big problems. I’ve distilled my thoughts on delegation down to four steps that I want to share to help you make sure you’re setting people up for success.
At a high level, I want each team member to have a good understanding of the problem we’re working on and feel empowered to solve their part as they best see fit. I’ve found the best results when I get a team of brilliant people together, point them in the right direction, and let them find the optimal solutions to the problems.
Key steps for delegation:
1. Outline the problem & value of solving it
- What are you trying to solve?
- Why are you trying to solve it?
- Who are you trying to solve it for?
- What’s the value in solving it?
2. Outline the key elements of a good solution
- What does a good solution look like?
- E.g. a good solution is…
- Quick and dirty to get answers fast
- Polished and beautiful to present to client
- Cheap to manufacture at scale
Give the delegatee the tools they need to evaluate whether the solution is good so they don’t need to keep asking you. There’s always something that’s being optimized for in the solution and often people go down the wrong track if they don’t understand what good looks like.
3. Give any context that they need to know
Share the things you know that the delegatee will need to know to succeed. This can range from history, WIP work, identifying key team members to collaborate with, or really anything that you know that’s useful to the delegatee. Some examples:
- WIP CAD files are in this folder
- Kim’s got experience with making that welder work - talk to her before you weld
- John is chasing the supplier for parts - make sure your solution is ready before the parts arrive from the supplier
- Read this book to understand how these pumps work
- We tried X in an earlier test and it failed due to Y, so avoid doing X here
From the role of the delegator, it’s really challenging to spot the things you know and that will be important but that the delegatee doesn’t know, so I tend to err on the side of giving too much context and hoping some of it is useful.
From the role of the delegatee, try to walk through how you’ll approach solving the problem to spot gaps in context. Learning how to identify and resolve context gaps up front can save you a ton of time going the wrong direction on a task.
It’s also key as a delegatee to develop a gut feel for when you might be missing context during task execution and check in with the delegator. For me, this is often feeling like I’m going town a rabbit hole of needing to solve cascading problems or feeling like the task is way harder than I expected it to be.
4. Get out of the way
- Identify anything that’s dependent on you that they need in order to execute this task and either complete it immediately or transfer execution to the delegatee as part of solving the problem
- Identify any key stakeholders around the problem and make the connections so that the person working on the task can interface directly with the stakeholder without needing your involvement
- Explicitly empower the delegatee to make the key decisions about how to best solve the problem
- Some tasks will require you in the loop (e.g. reviewing the design) - work to minimize these blockers and deal with them as quickly as possible when they do arise
- Prioritize un-blocking other people over just about everything else. Very very little is so important that it justifies having someone else wait around idle.
Identifying & Fixing Errors in Delegation
When delegating a task, errors in each of the four steps tend to lead to classes of issues that stem from the step in which the error occurred. To help you quickly figure out where things went wrong, here’s how an error in each step tends to present:
1. Not outlining the problem & value
- Weird proposed changes to the plan that don’t solve the underlying problem
- If the person has gone a long way without getting feedback, often a fundamentally unworkable solution and a lot of wasted time
- This failure mode is often jarring and confusing for the delegator - kind of a “why on earth did you do that” feeling in my experience
Tips to resolve:
Ask the delegatee to articulate their understanding and listen for where their understanding comes unseamed from yours. Once you’ve identified the split, discuss the differences in understanding to align on the goal.
I’ve found that the misalignment is found through asking and listening rather than trying to rearticulate my understanding. There are inherently a lot of logical jumps that are skipped over in the compression of articulating an idea to another person and the misalignment exists in one of the jumps, so it’s incredibly time-consuming and ineffective to try to unfold each jump and wait for the other person to spot the misalignment. It’s much faster to ask questions and listen.
2. Not outlining key elements of a good solution
- Solution is optimized for the wrong metric and performs poorly
- Solution is missing a key element necessary to be successful
For example, on a project where we were on a very short and hard deadline, a team member was tasked with sourcing a set of hoses to go between components. The team member came back with a recommendation to purchase a cheap set of hoses that would have required a bunch of further procurement and assembly of fittings, where they had optimized for minimum cost. From my perspective, the key criteria were that the hoses deliver within 48 hours and work on the first try, while the cost didn’t matter much as the delay cost was much higher. I didn’t communicate the success criteria well and so the team member went in the wrong direction.
Tips to resolve:
- Give a concise list of what’s key in a good solution
- Explicitly identifying some things that don’t matter can be helpful, but the set of things that don’t matter is infinite by definition so don’t spend too much time on what doesn’t matter
- Checklists or bulleted lists are great here
3. Not transferring context
- Not solving parts of the problem that we’ve already solved
- Solution doesn’t fit well with other work the team is doing
- Reinventing the wheel
- Solution doesn’t work because person doing the work was missing a key piece of info from another team member.
Tips to resolve:
This can be difficult to spot ahead of time as it’s hard to identify what they don’t already know, so frequent check-ins and feedback in a standup is key.
In some cases, the missing context can be overall familiarity with the problem domain, in which case the person needs to be connected with a domain expert or senior engineer who can help provide the needed context.
4. Not getting out of the way
- You’re being asked to approve everything
- Very small tasks being handed off to team members
- Feeling like you’re the linchpin of the team and everything would collapse without you
Tips to resolve:
If you see someone not understanding something from steps 1-3, feel free to give them the info they need, but don’t get in their way of them executing the task or take over. If you believe that they understand the problem, what a good solution looks like, and have the context to solve the problem, then trust that they’ll deliver. You should only take a task back when the cost of failure is so high and the timeline so short that there isn’t space to support the delegatee, but if that’s the case you probably shouldn’t have delegated the task to begin with.
Further thoughts
If you do the hiring well and set people up for success through good delegation, you’ll be blown away by what people can accomplish. People will make mistakes that you could have prevented, but they’ll also come up with creative and brilliant solutions you would never have thought of.
This level of trust will feel uncomfortable. If you’re not currently uncomfortable with how much you’re trusting your team to deliver, you’re not going far enough. Lean in. Your team will deliver if you make the space and trust them.
If you’re not sure if it’ll be faster to train someone else or do it yourself, err on the side of training. I’ve found the payback time is always way faster than I expect and I can’t think of a time I’ve regretted training someone on something.