Delegation vs Abdication

In one of my first ever performance discussions, my then-manager rattled off a series of improvement suggestions. Whilst almost all of them were of no surprise to me, I was unprepared for her comments about me "letting go" of some of the work I was doing. Not only did this fit our consultant business model (pushing more project hours towards junior consultants, when possible, pushed up margins) she advised me that delegation learned early on would make it easier for me to lead others, later on in my career.

I have to confess, its always been a challenge for me since I'm naturally wired to get stuck in. I also believe many of us have the same wiring.

I tend to poke my nose into all sorts of work matters, especially with projects. Its not a team trust issue to want to do stuff that others should be doing, but just in my somewhat curious nature to help out and get involved in broader functional matters. I'm sure I must have given my colleagues a great deal of frustrating moments, peering over their shoulders and offering up a hundred different absurd suggestions! Even though this sounds like micromanagement, my intentions were always about delivering the best team productions we were capable of, while keeping energy levels up. If that meant making the coffee for our graphic designer while he weaved our draft client documents into works of art, so be it.

My best managers over my career, the ones who helped me be the best that I could, were all supreme delegators, and this helped me personally work on this over the years. They would give clear work briefs, enough latitude to tackle these creatively and effectively, and then remain available for guidance and feedback if needed. The buck always stopped with them though, for as much as freedom as was given within our teams, they always took responsibility externally. Success was shared and celebrated, failure was absorbed individually, then post-mortems done to avoid repetition.

Development of talent simply has to follow similar lines. Nothing crushes human potential and ambition more than merely getting told to "do stuff" without proper guidance nor context, and then being hammered for not getting it right. Managers today sometimes think they are postboxes to distribute higher-up work requests within their own teams, and will take credit for good outcomes but assign blame for poor ones. This is not Delegation but Abdication.

Such managers are spirit-destroyers, and not in any good, exorcist-type context. They crush human spirit by shining a light on how ugly and brutal modern corporations can be. Driven by ego and personal ambition, these "managers" care little for anything but preservation of fiefdoms and status quo. They are the opposite of the bold leaders we need to develop superstars in the modern economy.

Talent flow, identified through research by Sydney Finkelstein as being a crucial element of some of his surveyed corporations' business success, gets bottlenecked by such weak managers. In fact, that's what they are - stopcocks in the flow of talent, that are constantly in the "off" position!

Stopcocks constantly feel under threat of losing their however-earned positions - so it may just be that they adopt abdication techniques, consciously or not, as a self-preservation strategy. Problem is, companies end up retaining mediocrity at fairly senior levels and forcing out new, fresh potential stars - without even realizing this. Performance management systems in their current forms would simply show "poor performers" to be the ones leaving. (Yay, our system works!)

I once asked an ex-manager why she was so open with me by teaching me her "secret techniques" in crunching numbers, in the days before Exel made us all mathematicians. She was in her early fifties, you see, I was a starry-eyed twenty-something. In my reasoning, was she not threatened that our employer would be interested in replacing her with someone like me, if she shared all her secrets?

She just smiled at me and in her usual direct forthright style told me, that was indeed her personal objective. After all, if she could not groom a successor, how else would she get promoted?

(This piece is a dedication to all our mothers, wives, aunts, daughters and sisters. You are truly the Rocks we sing about, and we should award you nothing but undying respect.)