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.
Assigns the work with genuine enthusiasm and reclaims it at the first sign of wobble — a question that suggests uncertainty, a draft that isn't right yet, a timeline looking tight. "Don't worry, I'll take this one." Has now trained the entire team that any visible difficulty causes work to be removed from them, and cannot understand why nobody seems to be growing into anything, or why questions have gradually stopped being asked out loud.
Delegates the task in complete detail: every step, in order, with the intended approach specified and the decisions pre-made. Produces a document that took longer to write than the work would have. The person receiving it has been given the labor and none of the judgment, and will return with a question at every point the manual didn't anticipate, which is all of them. The Instruction Manual concludes the task was too complex to have handed over.
Hands the thing over in a single sentence and is not seen again until the deadline. Provides no context on why it matters, which constraints are real, or who else has opinions. Reappears at the review visibly disappointed, having discovered that the result doesn't match a set of expectations that existed entirely inside their own head and were never at any point spoken aloud. Regards the gap as a failure of initiative rather than of briefing.
Delegates only when already underwater, at which point what gets handed over is the least explicable work, with no runway and a deadline in two days. Treats delegation as an emergency pressure valve rather than something done deliberately while there was still time. The results are poor, which confirms the belief that delegating doesn't really work here, and guarantees the next handover will also happen at two days' notice.
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?