Delegation and Participation

Leadership requires delegation. This is the case whether or not you admit it, support it, influence it, or benefit from it. The reason is simple and fundamental: in any effort or activity that is large or complex enough to require a team of people and someone to lead that team, there will necessarily be too much work, too many details, and too many decisions for a single individual (the leader). As a result, the team members will necessarily have to take on work themselves, make decisions (big or small) on their own, take on leadership roles (big or small), and recursively delegate to their team's members. As a leader, you don't have a choice about this. What you can choose is how you manage and benefit from it.

It's common to think of delegation as simply concerning task assignment. There are a bunch of things to do, so let's divvy them up and deal them out like playing cards. Leaders (and especially leaders who are overworked) are often told to delegate more - rather than take the work on themselves - which further cements the notion that delegation is just about pushing out work to others. There's some truth to this, but I think it misses a lot. I view delegation as opportunity creation and as autonomy, ownership, and responsibility creation. It's amazing that something as deceptively simple as "giving out work" can carry with it so many profound things.

The main thing we do at work is of course work. Work is the raw material of our professional lives. Therefore, it's the primary substance through which all of the higher-level structures and concepts are conveyed, constructed, and realized. As a result, when you're delegating, you're creating the contexts, the situations, and the opportunities in which people and teams will build, explore, grow, serve the constituents, develop their careers, employ their autonomy, fulfill their responsibilities, exercise their ownership, and carry out all of the other aspects of their professional lives. I think that's important enough that it deserves more thought and more intention than just casually lobbing out tasks to the crowd.

Delegation is every leader's most fundamental tool for growth and leverage. It's not the only way, but it is the most foundational way, to expand the scope and volume of what you and your teams can accomplish. If there's too much to do, just get more people and get them to do it, right? If you want to take on more, just get more people and get them to do it, right? If only it were that easy! Putting aside real-world complexities for a minute, this simple characterization does reveal a couple of important things about delegation.

The first is that delegation involves a transfer. While it's always the case that work is being transferred, there's actually something more profound happening as well, even in the simplest and crudest forms of delegation. Along with that work, no matter how simple or rote, comes responsibility. So, responsibility is being transferred. In delegating the work, the manager is relinquishing some of their control. This is true in a reduced way even in command-oriented or micromanaged environments. So, control is being transferred. In taking on that work, the employee is necessarily accepting it and taking ownership for it in some way, at some level. So, ownership is being transferred.

In more sophisticated and substantial forms of delegation, the person to which the work is being transferred is also being asked to, granted the right to, and agreeing to act as an delegate, as a representative, as an agent with agency and autonomy. They're not just taking on a particular workload, but also taking ownership and responsibility for the cognitive load, the decision making, the appropriate application of wisdom, creativity, and pragmatism, and many other things. At the same time, others are proportionally ceding those rights and responsiblities within that specific area of work, in order to transfer them to the delegate. They benefit by having less work, but they have to give up and let go of control in exchange. The delegate makes a reciprocal trade: they have to do more work, but they gain autonomy and stature in the process. Participating in this exchange requires courage on the part of everyone involved.

The second is the association between delegation, team size, and hiring. At the most basic and obvious level, delegation requires people to delegate to, so it's necessary to have a team of some minimum size. While it may be possible to delegate more, and more effectively, to the existing team, there's a limit to this. Quickly, the team's members will become genuinely, fully loaded (if they weren't already) and attempting to assign them more work would be unfair, inhumane, and counterproductive. At that point, it becomes necessary to grow the team, through internal reassignment, external recruiting, etc. As we said above, just get more people and give them work, right?

From this progression, we can see the various ways in which delegation promotes, enacts, and is necessary for growth, in its various senses. Delegation allows for growth in the team's capacity by ensuring each team member has the full volume of work, ownership, and other responsibilites that they can handle. Delegation can remove leaders as bottlenecks by moving work, decision making, and other efforts out to team members. It requires growth in the team's size, as discussed. Finally, delegation enables growth in the careers and capabilities of all team members.

Highly functional organizations are structured around delegation. Some organizations, including the ones where the leader deals out tasks, simply use delegation. But what happens if we take it as a first-class priority and defining principle for how we build and operate our organization? What if the policy is "delegation-first" or "delegation by default"?

As with any policy or approach, this can go wrong if implemented in an incorrect or imbalanced way. If leaders take "delegation-first" to mean "delegation-only" and believe as a result that they don't need to do any real work themselves, then that's clearly problematic. If they assign blame and fault to others as readily as they delegate, then the result will be a toxic and fearful environment that lacks true accountability and introspection. If they think delegating means being hands off or handling the team with kid gloves, rather than staying appropriately and responsively engaged, then the team will be unsupported and the risk of failure uncontained. The idea that leaders need simply to "educate and delegate" - by setting the context and then kicking the team members out of the nest to see if they can fly - doesn't work on its own. You need to participate as well.

On the other hand, a delegation-first policy has a lot of benefits if implemented well. Pursuing this single principle has the potential to strategically and tactically guide the leader's planning, motivate their work, inform decisions, and focus their efforts. By continuously seeking to increase delegation within the team, the leader will unavoidably employ delegation as a tool for leverage and growth, as a machine for the creation of autonomy and opportunity, and as a vehicle for imparting ownership, and so on.

In concrete terms, a leader might pursue a delegation-first strategy by asking themselves the following questions (or similar) and implementing the best answers they can develop for their particular situation and circumstances. Does the team currently have enough work, along with the attendant opportunity, autonomy, and responsibility? If not, then the leader needs not just to secure more work, but to secure more areas of responsibility and impact, which serve as contexts in which the team and team members can grow. Does the team have too much work, with each member genuinely loaded to the maximum reasonable, sustainable level? Then the leader needs to lead growth in the headcount of the team. Is the leader currently acting as a bottlneck or "ownership hog" in any areas? If so, the ownership of those areas needs to be supportively delegated to team members. Are there processes, procedures, and/or practices anywhere within the team that could be automated or standardized? If there are any - and there almost always are - then a team member should be tasked with developing the standardization and automation so that eventually no one has to expend significant effort on this recurring task. Currently, what things is the leader uniquely capable of, or positioned to handle, that are inappopriate or impossible to delegate? The leader should continue to own those key tasks while working toward a future in which the entire team is elevated and it is possible to hand those tasks off to upcoming leaders.

What if we go even further with this approach? What if we move away altogether from the idea of assigning work and into a world where people take on things naturally because it's in their area of ownership, it's in their wheelhouse, they're eager to take on new opportunities, they're an engaged part of the team doing their part, and/or because it's important work that's not otherwise being handled? What if delegation is simply woven into the fabric of the organization, an unquestionable property taken for granted? What we discover is that taking delegation to this extreme largely eliminates delegation as a distinct notion or activity. Once the benefits and effects of delegation - including ownership, autonomy, responsibility, etc - take hold, the distribution of work flows naturally out of them, rather than from the leader.

In its final form, delegation gives way to participation. Just as leaders need to participate (and educate and delegate), so too every team member needs to participate in the full world of the team. This doesn't mean that everyone needs to be involved in everything all the time, which would of course be overwhelming and inefficient. Instead, it means that essentially everything is available to everyone and that there's an expectation that each team member will do their part by choosing the areas in which they want to be involved. Ideally, this involvements comes from self-interest and self-motivation, but a healthy dose of social pressure and expectations can play an important role as well.

Rather than being passive receivers of work or accumulators of burden, team members should actively seek out the best and highest potential work they can do. They should accept their agency and autonomy and employ it for their benefit and the benefit of the team. This can, and ideally should, extend to the creation of opportunity and the growth of the team. Every team member should be on the lookout for new ideas and projects. They should be taking advantage of their unique position working in the details of specific efforts to creatively devise new solutions, new projects, and even new products. And they should feel empowered and responsible to suggest these ideas to the team, promote them, and even pursue them as appropriate. Similarly, every team member should identify when there's too much work to do and should advocate for growth in the team and assist in recruiting efforts.

An environment in which there are high levels of participation produces yet another benefit: it serves as a leadership training academy and proving ground. Rather than ICs acting only as task rabbits or worker bees, each has the opportunity to learn about, see, and participate in the various kinds of leadership necessary to run teams, build products, make money, and get things done. Those who have (or develop) interest and skills in the work of leadership will self-select and self-identify themselves as leaders. Those who do not can continue to focus on developing their skills and efficacy in their core area of expertise, while still gaining exposure to the broader context in which they and their work reside.