Delegation is Overrated

This article is an updated version of a post with the same name that I published on my now-retired blog at testobsessed.com back in 2020.

We were just coming back from lunch, taking our seats in the circle once again. The leadership seminar that we were all attending was about to resume. As we assembled, we were chatting among ourselves (as you do). The topic of delegation came up.

“Delegation is overrated,” I said, shaking my head.

The faces around me registered a mix of surprise and shock. Belatedly I remembered that these folks didn't know me, hadn't seen me lead. They may have thought that I was a control freak unable to let go of even minute details. “Learn to delegate” is one of the traditional pieces of management advice. It's sacred wisdom and I'd committed blasphemy.

Internally I groaned, regretting my comment. The session was going to start soon. I did not want to leave my colleagues with a wrong impression, nor did I want to derail the discussion or take attention away from the workshop leader. I tried to explain myself quickly.

The intent behind delegation is laudable, I acknowledged. If a leader tries to do everything themselves, they'll become a bottleneck. They will also irritate their team members because they get all the interesting work while the team twiddles their thumbs. So a leader who does not know how to delegate at all will be wholly ineffective.

But the conventional wisdom lacks needed detail. Just learning how to hand out tasks won't make your team more successful. In fact, shifting from an attitude of if-I-want-it-done-right-I-have-to-do-it-myself to I-delegate-by-personally-handing-out-assignments-to-individuals probably won't improve the situation.

A leader who delegates tasks to individuals may free up their time to take on more strategic work, but they are still a bottleneck. It's a hub-and-spoke model of leadership: the leader is the hub, the team members are the spokes, and there's inevitably a traffic jam at the hub because everything ultimately ends up going through the leader. Team members only do the most valuable or important work if the leader has the time, space, and insight to correctly identify what that work is. Thus the organization can only operate as fast as the leader can make good decisions about what to do next.

Further, the leader ends up being the “head” while the team members are the “hands.” The leader thinks big strategic thoughts; team members execute. That means the organization does not benefit from the full range of the team's talents. In addition, team members may not have many real growth opportunities, except to the extent they're able to climb the ladder and become a hub in their own right.

In short, the concept of delegation focuses entirely on the leader. That places too much burden on the leader and short changes the team members.

That's as far as I got in my explanation before the facilitator for the leadership workshop brought us back to the topic for the day. The folks around me looked skeptical but did not shun me for my heresy.

I wish I'd had time to provide just a little more detail. If I had, I would have continued my explanation with a reframe: instead of delegating to individuals, lean on your team.

As the leader, you set goals and specify constraints. “Here's what we're trying to do,” you might say. Or “here's the problem we're trying to solve.” You define success criteria for near term goals as well as establishing the direction of the larger arc of work. And you make it clear what is out of bounds. Perhaps you have a budget or a timeline that the team must adhere to, or there are aspects of the problem space that have been pre-determined like a technology stack, or there is something about the existing context that must be preserved.

I think of this as a house. The goals are the roof, pointing up. The constraints are the walls. And the foundation is culture: the set of unwritten rules of behavior, norms, and assumptions that guide everyday work life.

Even if you have organizational authority, you don't set goals or constraints totally unilaterally.

As a leader, you yourself are part of a leadership team. So you work closely with your colleagues to ensure that your team's goals are aligned with the larger organizational strategy and that the constraints take into account the interdependencies between teams.?

Your team also needs to have a voice in the goal setting, and the freedom to question the constraints. Just because you want something doesn't mean the team can deliver. So you work with the team to understand what is feasible and what degrees of freedom or resources the team needs to make it happen. You use the team's feedback in making the goals and constraints concrete (and measurable if appropriate).

You also discuss why the goals are important and why the constraints matter. The team needs to understand the significance of the work and the context in which they are operating. Understanding the Why behind the work is as important — sometimes more so — than understanding the work itself.?

Framing work in terms of goals and constraints for the team makes the team the agent of work. Who will take on a given task? Let the team decide. As the leader, you intervene in the work if absolutely necessary to ensure that the team is on target and healthy. That is, you are accountable for ensuring that the team is on track to deliver, all members of the team are doing their fair share, everyone has opportunities to stretch and grow, no one is forced by their peers into a position they don't want to be in, and the team dynamic remains healthy overall.

So instead of learning to delegate, I challenge rising leaders to learn how to do these four things:

• Establish goals
• Define constraints
• Explain the Why
• Trust the team

The result is a team that delivers solutions that are far richer than if everyone worked independently. Further, team members are likely to be more engaged because they can bring all their talents, skills, and experience to play in deciding how to do the work.

Finally, the Leadership House model applies whether you manage a team of individual contributors, a team of managers, a team of leaders who manage managers, or a team of executives. It's houses all the way down. The larger the scope of responsibility of the team, the larger the house, but the same philosophy of setting goals and establishing constraints applies.

Oh, and if you read all this and are thinking “...but that just describes healthy delegation,” I actually agree. That's why I regretted speaking up in the leadership seminar. It's not that I think delegation is a bad idea, it's that I have seen it done poorly too often. Too many leaders think they're establishing a house for their team to operate in, yet still somehow end up being a frazzled, overworked hub in a hub-and-spoke model. Usually it's because the goals are so tactical that they're tasks, and the constraints are not guard rails but rather micromanagement in disguise. However sometimes it's because the leader forgets to communicate the constraints until after they've been violated and then has to do damage control. Or they set goals that are so vague they spend all their time trying to unstick the team or reset expectations. Either way, the leader is still the bottleneck and the team is still unable to reach their full potential.

So next time you're delegating work, make sure you're building a house instead of making yourself the hub in a hub-and-spoke arrangement. It's better for your stress levels, for the team members' autonomy and career growth, for the team's effectiveness, and for the overall health of the organization.