The idea behind delegation is clear: to free up time to focus on other important work while offering your team opportunities for growth and development. It sounds simple, yet, it’s hard to do, and there’s no good (as in, always working) instruction manual to it.
In this blog post, I will not try to offer the manual but share some advice heavily inspired by a great book on career development called Rise by Patty Azzarello.
Picture yourself on the delegation spectrum, navigating between two edges that can threaten your team’s success: micromanaging and abandonment.
Micromanagement is that nervous itch that creeps in when you fear things won’t go as planned. So you start meddling, interfering in areas where you feel most confident and knowledgeable—where you’re the expert. It’s a common trap for leaders who want everything to be perfect, especially for those promoted after being the best engineer on the team.
On the flip side, there’s abandonment – a far-off corner of the delegation spectrum. It is when you hand something over completely and distance yourself from any responsibility for the outcome. Especially when it’s work you hate or know little about, it gives this good feeling of relief not to have to deal with it personally. However, being this hands-off in only some areas sends weird signals to your team. They may start thinking that the things you meddle in are important to you and the things you don’t intervene in are not.
Here’s the secret sauce: no matter how well you know the work you’re delegating, you should always retain ownership of its successful outcome. If you catch yourself tempted to either micromanage or abandon the whole thing, take a breath and try a different approach:
- Set a clear desired outcome
- Establish a set of intermediate outcomes and measures
- Communicate the desired outcome and discuss together how you intend to measure progress
Think of it as creating a roadmap for a journey toward succeeding in that particular project.
It will require some extra work on your side to really understand what the project/feature/task is about and what success looks like. Yet, this outcome-oriented approach will keep you in the loop as the project progresses without getting lost in the nitty-gritty details or completely disengaging.
This concept lets you balance your involvement and trust in your team’s capabilities. Where exactly you’ll land on the delegation spectrum will be different with every project, but after applying the approach several times, you’ll start noticing patterns and can improve based on the observations.
In a nutshell, micromanagement stems from the fear of failure, making leaders excessively interfere in areas where they feel most confident. On the other side of the spectrum is abandonment, which occurs when tasks are handed over without any involvement. To help strike a balance, we’ve looked at a simple approach to define clear outcomes and ways to measure progress. By adopting this approach, leaders can foster trust in their team’s capabilities and optimize delegation strategies for different projects.
As someone biased towards giving plenty of space while working on my projects, I found these simple steps helpful in getting more involved without overstepping boundaries. I hope my team would agree with this statement, too 🙃
