Delegate Results not Tasks

I’ve had the opportunity and privilege of leading teams for 8+ years. When I first became a manager, I was told that “my output is the output of the team” and I really took it to heart. As my team grew I soon realized that I was becoming a blocker. I was taking on more things than I should, my team was waiting on tickets that I had taken on, they were waiting for me to make a decision, or for me to unblock them. Necessity is what drove me to become more pragmatic.

No matter how good you are as an individual, you cannot achieve great things alone. If you want to build a successful business or a high performing team, you need to hire the right people and then allow them to do the job you hired them to do.

It’s not about delegating tasks. It’s about delegating the result you want to see. You make a person accountable for a result, grant them the authority they need to exercise that accountability, make clear the rules of the engagement, then get out of the way. It’s important they have the authority to do the things needed to achieve the result. Accountability without authority is setting people up for failure.

Let’s take a concrete example. As the technical lead for my team, I try my best to gain enough clarity about the ask/project coming my way that I can make a decision on priority. The finer details though, that I leave to whoever ends up owning the project. It could be me. It could be another engineer on the team. I expect the owner of the project to do all the things required to achieve the goal. I expect them to speak to the stakeholders about the problem, understand requirements, write up a proposal and come back to me about what he/she thinks we should do. They don’t need to do all the work, but it is them that I will turn to when I want to know where we are on a project and what our next steps are. They are accountable for the result, but they achieve it together with the team.

The type of problem I assign to an individual usually depends on their level of seniority. For a junior, I tend to assign problems that are more certain, more scoped out. The level of uncertainty of the problem increases based on their capability.

It is important you give ownership to your team because you want them to grow and drive the change you want. The more you empower your team, the less they depend on you and the more opportunity you have to focus on the bigger picture. For you to focus on the important but not urgent initatives.

Do not be afraid of delegating the difficult problems. In my experience, people end up being more resourceful than you expect. Set them up for success, but also leave room for them to fail. Your goal is to guide them, be there to catch them if they fall, course correct as needed and keep things moving in the right direction. People grow from their failures. If they are too afraid to fail, they'll never take the risks that you need them to take.

Empower your team, and in turn, they will empower you.