A former colleague, now a good friend, posted an article the other day about his thoughts on delegation within systems, teams and ways of working. The premise of his writing is that responsibilities should be delegated, not tasks. In the leadership space, I think there is room for delegation of both responsibilities and tasks; here are some of my thoughts on both.

Some time ago, I read a book (I can’t remember which) that had two essential messages:

“Delegate, don’t abdicate. Trust but validate.”

I think these are two powerful concepts that many leaders both get wrong and misinterpret.

Empowering leadership through responsibility delegation

As a leader of leaders, my role is to create a landscape of oversight for my department because I can’t be in detail all the time. This oversight creates something similar to the “observers effect” in quantum physics, where the observation of an event changes its outcome. ¹

For this to be effective, I need to “carve up” my department into areas of responsibility, and as my leadership team matures, I start to delegate areas of responsibility so I can keep myself at the strategic and tactical levels and not have to worry about the operational side too much.

I talk a little bit about this in another post, but the crux is creating an environment of trust, where the leader feels they have control of their domain and the permission to own it and, most importantly, the space to experiment and fail/learn.

One of the tools I use to help facilitate this comes from a book called “Turn the ship around“, where David Marquet talks about coaching his crew (on a submarine) to communicate their intent, not ask for permission. So in practice, my team would come to me and say, “I intend to …” rather than “Can I do X”.

Just this simple change in phrasing changes the dynamic from one of permission to one of empowered intent. Nine times out of ten, I simply (and figuratively) nod, and they proceed, but it also creates an opportunity for me to give feedback rather than being the gatekeeper. This empowers the leader to own it but also allows them to experiment with safety.

Tuning Telemetry

For delegation to be effective, whether it is the responsibility or task delegation is to get the direction of “status” changed from pull to push. By this, I mean move to a state where you, as a leader, don’t have to ask for updates.

To do this well, there are a couple of things that need to be clarified

• what is the urgency/importance of the matter in my view
• what impact does it have on my team/department/company

By clarifying the urgency/importance of something, my team figure out the frequency and depth that I need to be kept in the loop given the level of impact.

For those of you that come from a SysAdmin background, I jokingly use the “LOGLEVEL” metaphor. LOGLEVEL is a status in logging that indicates the severity of the information logged, INFO, WARNING, ERROR or CRITICAL (to name a few).

Clarifying the severity helps my leadership team and I tune the type and amount of information that needs to be “passed up”.

This all comes back to having oversight; I often say to my team, I don’t need the detail; I need to be able to talk to it; this helps do that.

Tracking task delegation

Because I typically sit across so many different areas, which are Product, Engineering, QA, Corporate Services, Information Security and Platform, I find it helpful to keep track of any high-level items I delegate to the team. This isn’t to micromanage; it is simply a tool for me to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

I have found Trello to be a valuable tool for this and to use labels to show who owns the task. If you have tuned your telemetry as described above, this almost entirely takes care of itself.

Summary

Delegation as an activity can be challenging because it is an explicit release of “power”. Many leaders struggle with this as they must be on top of everything and validate every decision or action. Great leadership and the ability to truly scale as a department or business is about good delegation and is founded on trust and confidence that your team can own that responsibility or task.

Happy delegating. 🙂

References

1. A Leader’s guide to cybersecurity, Page 4-5