Delegation is not handing something over

Ask a room of senior people whether they delegate well and almost everyone says yes. Ask the people who report to them and the answer is considerably more mixed. We have been on both sides of that gap.

The gap exists because delegation gets defined as giving someone a task. It is not. Giving someone a task is the easy half, and it is the half that changes nothing about how much of the work is still, in practice, yours.

Three things that travel separately

When you hand something over, four things could move: the task, the information, the authority to decide, and the answerability for the outcome.

Most of us move the first and hold the other three. The task leaves the desk. The context stays in your head, so they keep having to come back for it. The decisions still route through you, so they cannot move without a meeting. And you are still the one who will answer for it, which is why you keep checking.

What that produces is not a freed-up leader and a growing colleague. It is a person doing the mechanical parts of a job you are still really doing, and a leader who feels busier than before delegating and cannot say why.

The test we have found useful is not "have I given them the task". It is: can they make a decision I would not have made, and have it stand?

If the answer is no, you have not delegated. You have distributed typing.

Why we hold on

We should be honest that the reasons are not usually bad ones.

Some of it is speed. You genuinely can do it faster, this once, and there is a deadline. That is true and it is a trap, because it is true every single time, and the compounding runs against you: the twentieth time you do it yourself, they are still where they were, and you are more indispensable and less useful.

Some of it is standards. The work will come back at eighty per cent of what you would have produced. That is real. But eighty per cent from someone who is learning becomes a hundred and ten in two years, and a hundred per cent from you, forever, becomes a ceiling on the whole team.

And some of it — the part worth naming plainly — is identity. If the hard thing no longer needs you, what are you for? Most of us were promoted for being the person who could do the hard thing. Letting it go feels like letting go of the reason we are in the room.

Handing it over properly

We would put four things in the conversation, and we would say them out loud rather than assume them.

The outcome, not the method. Describe what good looks like and what it is for. Then let them get there their own way. If you are specifying method, you have not delegated the judgement, and the judgement is the part that develops anyone.

The context you have not written down. Which relationships are delicate, what was tried before, which number the board actually watches. This is the part that lives in your head and is the reason people keep having to ask.

The boundary. What they can decide alone, what they should tell you about after, and the short list that genuinely needs you first. Three categories, stated once, and then honoured — the honouring is the whole thing.

Who answers for it. In our view this should be them, publicly, with you carrying the consequence if it goes badly. Authority without answerability produces carelessness. Answerability without authority produces the thing we described at the top, and it burns people out.

The check that costs a minute

At the end of a handover, ask them to tell you what they are going to do and what they will decide without you.

You will find out immediately whether you handed over a job or a chore. It is an uncomfortable minute, and it is considerably cheaper than the version where you find out in six weeks, from the outcome.