How do I stop being a bottleneck?

Any manager (especially new managers) asks themselves how to balance between doing things themselves to delegating to their team?

And this is exactly what I was asked this week by one of the engineering managers I mentor.

This manager is managing 11 engineers and is expecting to hire more engineers next year.

Currently, the org is pretty flat. Everyone reports to this manager and is split into two scrum teams.

This manager is expecting to take a vacation in December for the first time this year, and the concern is how the teams will operate when the manager is away. In addition, there are many dependencies in the manager for day-to-day operations.

Since December is around the corner, there is not enough time to solve it.

For the reminder working days before the upcoming vacation, I suggested the following:

• The manager should focus on tying any loose ends until December and prioritize tasks that require the manager's attention.
• Documenting whatever needs to be done during December and ensuring the teams have solid plans for December (I recommended putting more than they can handle, so there will be no shortage of work).
• Working on spikes, POCs, Hackathon, or anything outside the day-to-day is another strategy I have used during holidays. It is also a great motivation boost for engineers to learn something new, try out a new open source project or technology they want to try, or have fun coding something and learning new things.

For the long term, the manager asked me what they should delegate and how to organize the teams?

What did I answer? I asked some questions instead (how annoying isn’t it).

Those are the questions I asked:

1. Make a list of all the things you do at work, and quantify how many hours per week you spend on each task (for example, weekly 1 on 1s with team members 6 hours per week).
2. Make a list of all the things you DO NOT do today (or DO NOT do enough of) which you think are extremely important for you to focus on. (In most cases, things on that list are related to important, not urgent items).
3. Make a list of things you do, but think are not a good use of your time and you should probably stop doing it (or spend less time on it).

I also asked this manager to make a list of all the engineers: The strengths of each one for the engineers and areas they would like to grow at.

That will be useful when delegating some of the manager's tasks to their team members and/or any future restructuring.

And last but not least, I asked if there was anything this manager does today that they think does not make sense to belong to them (potentially some gap that needs to be filled elsewhere). Especially in growth startups, it is often the case that there is a need for new roles and functions that do not exist yet.

Once those lists are created, that can be a base for discussion about restructuring the team and delegating tasks.

Once the manager returns from vacation, we will discuss how to think strategically about delegation and restructuring based on my questions.

To be continued...