Influence & Leadership
Delegation
Handing over the judgment, not just the typing.
Delegation is giving someone else responsibility for an outcome, along with enough context and authority to actually own it. The part people skip is the authority. It's straightforward to hand over a task and keep every decision about that task for yourself — which produces a person doing your typing, an outcome no better than if you had done it, and a delegator still holding all the load they were trying to shed. Real delegation means accepting that it will be done differently, sometimes worse the first time, and that this is the price of ever having capacity again. It's also the main mechanism by which anyone on your team learns to do harder things.
Scenarios
You hand a task to someone and they come back a day later with a question you could answer in ten seconds. What would you do — answer it and move on, or ask what options they see and which they'd pick, so the next question doesn't come back to you?
Work you delegated is being done in a way you wouldn't have chosen, but it will probably work. What would you do — redirect them to your approach, or let it run and reserve your input for outcomes that actually matter?
You're overloaded and the only work you could plausibly hand off is the most context-heavy thing you own. What would you do — keep it because explaining it would take longer than doing it, or start transferring it now, accepting a slower month to get a faster year?
Takeaway
- Delegate the outcome and the decisions that go with it. If you keep every judgment call, you haven't delegated, you've just added a step.
- Say what "done" looks like, what's fixed, and what's theirs to choose. Most delegation failures are unstated expectations.
- Answer questions with questions while the stakes are low. "What would you do?" transfers judgment; a direct answer transfers the task back.
- Let it be done differently. Intervene on outcomes that matter, not on approach you'd have picked.
- Hand things over while you still have time to support them. Delegation under emergency conditions mostly proves that delegation doesn't work.