Delegation is harder than it sounds
Getting unstuck so you can get going
No matter your phase of career or stage of company, things will inevitably get “stuck.” You will experience a frustrating lack of forward progress, repetitive work and a sense that you may even be moving away from your goal. As this problem spreads across the organization, more of your work day is spent on “work about work” rather than achieving your goals as you progress in your mission. This is a classic problem we tackle at Schutzworks with organizations of all sizes. While there are several causes to this complex problem: Too much work in progress, unclear strategy or goals, poor internal communication, and/or lack of prioritization, let’s focus today on what direct action you can take to get your organization back to work: delegation. For inverse advice as evidence, here’s a fun read from 1944 from the OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) on how to slow organizations down. Keep track of how many of these behaviors you see in your current organization.
Given that we are frustratingly finite beings in a seemingly infinite universe, there is only so much we can do every day, hence the inevitability of getting stuck. As such, you have to stop doing things that you are doing now, so that you can do something else. This leaves you with three choices:
Kill the work entirely
Automate with technology including AI
Get someone else to do it
We’re going to focus on that last one, because it turns out it is the easiest and most common of the three choices (good luck trying to get work killed). Delegation is therefore defined as the act of handing off work to someone else, ideally permanently. Nearly every leadership book tells you to “just delegate,” so sweet, problem solved! Sadly, it turns out that delegating work is harder than it seems, for technical and human reasons. So today we are going to dig into the why and what of delegation so you can get yourself unstuck and back in motion.
Why delegate?
There are at least three reasons to delegate work:
Quality: someone else can do the work better
Quantity: many more people can do the work in parallel to improve throughput
Comparative Advantage: you need to be freed up so that you can do other things that only you can do.
For those of you afflicted with generalism, delegation is challenging as you are likely woven across the organization, combining knowledge to plug gaps in unique, hard-to-scale ways, plagued by the fear that specialists are coming to outperform you in any given task. Or more positively, your organization wants to promote you, or deploy you against new uncertainties, often high reward externally facing activities like sales or client management. These are wonderful opportunities that you can only realize with the commitment of your greatest asset: your focused attention (which is why everyone fights for it). If you’d like to drive positive change and realize these new opportunities, you must constantly prepare to delegate, lest you get stuck reacting to calamity. The order of operations for improvement starts with subtraction and division to make room for addition and multiplication.
This may sound reasonable enough, but it turns out giving away your legos can be traumatic, representing a threat to your work identity, daily enjoyment derived from your work and standing in the organization. Done poorly, you can open yourself up to real career risk through distance from power and/or allowing your visibility to drop in an organization. Plus, you are probably so damn good at what you do, that any delegation poses an untenable risk for massive error or a reduction in quality. If you agree with the last statement, your ego is contributing to the unnecessary fragility of your organization. Perhaps the seemingly dry business activity of delegation has hidden within it deep emotionality and real risk? Given that, let’s calmly approach delegation efficiently, minimizing risk to your ego, your career and your organization.
When to delegate?
Like intubating a patient or estate planning, if you are thinking about it, start doing it. Good delegation takes time, so approach your daily work by constantly preparing to delegate it (see “how to delegate” below). If you fail to prepare, exigent circumstances such as a decrease in performance due to poor skill fit or a vacancy/new opportunity elsewhere pulling you for a promotion once you get out of your day to day, will force you to delegate poorly, also known as “dumping work.” A word of warning, if you are a leader who already cannot think past this week, you desperately needed to delegate, probably yesterday. Whenever the moment comes, you will be glad that you took the time for disciplined preparation.
To whom should you delegate?
Delegation requires a new owner for the work, which comes in the form of upskilling others (who may also need to delegate), hiring new team members from the outside and/or recruiting them from across the organization, or implementing new technology that can make work go away (looking at you AI, we all are). Hiring is a discipline unto itself that we will dive into another time. That said, decide to delegate first before hiring, so you know whom you ought to hire, generalist vs. specialist. Do NOT let the fear of new team members/more people to manage/temporary burn increase prevent you from hiring. Give ground grudgingly.
A common problem in the clinical world is the impact of regulation frustrating delegation. For better or worse, there are many laws/rules/policies that state only an officer/doctor/licensed individual can perform a task. In these instances, the approach to regulatorily limited delegation is to delegate the components of work and arrange a formal process for oversight wherever possible. For instance, the intern physician writes the note and the attending physician reads, signs and agrees. It isn’t perfect, the letter and spirit of the rules matter, but it is often the only way to expand the reach of your expertise to a greater population.
What to delegate first?
Note: If you see your role as a leader as constantly preparing work for delegation, then you retain some choice in the prioritization of what gets delegated. If you fail to prepare, you will be forced to delegate and will regard this section as a luxury. Sorry!
In terms of priority of delegation, there is probably some theoretical rubric you could create combining your job functions, neglected elements of your role and company goals. However, our work is very personal. We derive value, satisfaction, ego integrity and all sorts of psychological and emotional impact from our work. To that end, if you’d like to delegate efficiently (where there is no will, there is now way) here is your priority stack:
Things you hate doing
Things you like doing
Things you love doing
Inherent in this prioritization is the assumption that you are probably better at doing things you love and “things you hate doing” are likely the “things you are bad at,” which therefore make great candidates for delegation. If you are managing someone who refuses to delegate, have them start with the things they hate.
Delegating things you hate doing is the gateway drug to delegation. Getting rid of the worst parts of your day can feel like a tremendous relief. Congrats! Two words of warning: First, do not give away parts of work for things for which you are definitely responsible but are under skilled. For instance, if you are a manager, you may hate giving feedback and therefore want to delegate it to someone else. Bad idea, be the whole manager. Second, if you are a masochist (read: clinician), you may have the opposite problem in that you may be loath to give up things you think you have to do, are not good at, but somehow giving them up violates your sense of responsibility. In those moments, delegate them anyway and see if they ever come back to you (they won’t). Share your burden so we can all travel farther together.
Once you’ve enjoyed the thrill of delegating the things you hate, delegation gets just a little more challenging. Now you have to start delegating things you like doing, your “legos.” This is the work you enjoy, that passes the time, that brings you value and reputation gain. The work you like usually represents work that challenges you and makes you feel good. The likelihood with this work is that someone else can do it better, in greater volume or at least with comparative advantage. That someone could do it better implies that you have to manage your ego when delegating the things you like, because you are going to delegate to or hire someone that does it better than you. Several people in fact. If you do it right, no one will even remember that you used to do that. You can and should (quietly and privately) grieve your loss of enjoyment and recognition, and then learn about naches– joy from the successes of others, usually one’s children. Naches is often experienced as a tearful, consuming joy, shared between generations (or levels of the hierarchy). It is the fuel of parenting and can be the fuel of great management. And like your children, the great people to whom you trust, delegate and develop, they will leave and surpass you. That is the goal.
Ok, phew, we did it. Done, right, all we have left are things we love about our job. We get to keep those, right? Wait, what, no not that, don’t take that too!? I recall a time at Iora health when I looked around our office from my desk and saw four different multidisciplinary teams working on complex problems without me. They all nominally worked for me (really for our care teams and our patients), but they didn’t need me. It didn’t even occur to them to get me. I’ll admit, I was a little crushed. I had succeeded in delegating my way out of my favorite part of the job – the building. This is where things get tricky. To continue to deliver value to your organization, you are going to have to let go of (some) of the things that fill your tank. Do NOT give them all away, unless achieving the mission is what gives you joy. While there may be things “only you can do,” you must enjoy them or you will quit.
These transitions, delegating the things you love to take on new opportunities or focus on maximum value, represent a risky time for you and your organization. Do you accept the new challenge, get stuck in the old, try to do too much, or decline an opportunity that really is not right for you or the company? These are late night, sleep losing, spousal discussion times. This is when you dig out the Sparketypes and Strengthsfinder results. Unfortunately, the answer is unique to you and your moment in time. While “up” is not always the right next direction, you are better off listening to those around you that believe in you, than falling prey to your own fears. Believe in your ability to delegate, fully commit and then fully release.
So, how to actually delegate?
Like getting on a moving treadmill, smooth transitions matter in delegation. Fortunately, if you can describe the work, then you can delegate the work. As you are now constantly preparing to delegate, use every instance of delegation to resolve ambiguities in your processes, while building for greater scale and stability. This is also known as making decisions and writing stuff down, two things most of us hate doing. Here are the steps to delegation:
Step 1: Describe the intended result of the activity, in the context of the organization’s mission & goals, the why. Magically, you will discover that some of what you do lacks purpose and is a great candidate to kill said work.
Step 2: Share the current process steps, teaching/training. The rigor of your documentation is proportional to the judgment required of the job AND the number of people doing it in parallel. More people implies greater investment in materials.
Step 3: Build relationships. The reason for halted delegation, especially in patient or client work, is the seeming non-substitutability of relationships. The answer, then, is to prepare the recipient and client for the delegation with empathy and deliberation. You don’t always have time on your side, so you have to have high quality introductions, the warmest of handoffs. For internal work you should introduce the recipient around to stakeholders with pride, high expectations and honesty. Do not make self-deprecating jokes, make promises about your availability that you cannot keep, or undermine your replacement. It is no longer about you.
Step 4: Share (or set up) your management system so that results can be monitored in real time by the responsible party that is either you or someone else. Real time feedback combined with disciplined iteration can solve almost any problem. It isn’t the only way, but it is a reliable way.
Step 5: Fade away. First check in proactively, then “be available,” then disappear. Too fast is slightly better than too slow, but sink or swim is bad training.
And that’s it! You are now on your way to building a more durable organization, making better use of everyone’s talents/strengths/relationships, developing everyone around you, building resilience by removing points of failure, and learning new challenges. And all you had to do was give away the things you love.