A Delegation Guide for Managers

Tech Manager Handbook: A Series

Why delegate?

As a manager you typically need to strike a balance between people management (1:1s, coaching, feedback, etc.), administrative work (scheduling, meetings, planning, etc.), and often even some hands-on IC work (projects, coding, modeling, etc.). You only have so many hours in a day so you need to be deliberate in what you choose to spend your time on. It’s a cliché but remember that saying “yes” to one thing is equivalent to saying “no” to something else (i.e. your time is zero-sum).

Fortunately you have a team (likely of several ICs) that you can assign work to (hooray!). However, there are still many factors to consider before simply delegating projects at random, so let’s get into it.

How to know who to choose (a checklist)

You want to align the projects you are delegating to specific individuals based on a number of factors:

• Domain: If someone is an expert in the relevant domain (e.g. particular product feature or problem space), then it would make sense for new projects in that domain (or adjacent to it) to be assigned to them.
• Technical skills: If someone has the most familiarity with a key system or technical approach, it might make sense to assign to them.
• Importance & urgency: If a particular project is urgent or high-impact you’ll want to assign it to the strongest person possible (and stay plugged in yourself).
• Stretch: Assign tasks to people that are at or slightly above someone’s current skill-level (to “stretch” them). If it is too far below, it won’t be engaging or motivating for them. If it is too far above, they won’t be able to execute effectively.
• Career goals & interests: If a particular project aligns with someone’s career goals it might also be a good fit.
• Longer-term planning: If there is a project that will put someone on a particular long-term course, be extra thoughtful in ensuring that the individual is the right person for future projects in that area.

You probably won’t be able to nail every one of the above bullet points, but it will be helpful to run through all of these considerations on a case-by-case basis to weigh the pros and cons before delegating.

When to stay plugged in or even get hands on

Stay involved with critical projects (without putting yourself in the critical path) — these are more urgent and important and are a good use of your time. Delegate the bulk of the hands-on work but stay involved to help accelerate, unblock, and guide the work, ensuring that it stays on track and hits its key milestones. These are often projects that you’ll occasionally need to represent to other leaders across your company; staying involved means you can speak knowledgeably about the work and how it is progressing when needed.

Another good place to spend your own time being hands-on is with new, exploratory, experimental, high-uncertainty ideas. Given your experience and broader context of your business, you can probably spot these opportunities earlier (with higher precision) and be able to investigate or prototype things with minimal scope relatively quickly in order to de-risk them. Use your judgement and determine how viable this new body of work might be, then find the appropriate place to delegate (even if it means creating new staffing to support it).

Most common pitfall for know-how managers

A “know-how manager” (to borrow a term from Andy Grove here) is a manager that not only supervises employees, but also possesses a significant amount of relevant technical knowledge and experience themselves. A know-how manager typically got their start in management by excelling at the same type of work they are now leading (e.g. a senior engineer being promoted to an engineering manager).

As a result, the most common challenge for know-how managers is that oftentimes the work in question could be done “best” or “fastest” if they were to do it themselves. Given that you can’t do all of the work all of the time indefinitely, hoarding the work is obviously not a good idea. Resign yourself to the fact that some projects may take 2–5 times longer and only reach 50–80% of the result that could have been achieved if you were to do it yourself. Over time, the people on your team will get better and faster meaning that eventually they will complete projects as well and as quickly as you could have (or even better and faster than you!). Think of it as a short-term cost (an up-front investment in coaching/guidance/iteration) with longer-term rewards (time back, stronger team, career development, etc.). The alternative is that you hoard work, burn-out, and limit your ability to scale.

Delegate projects belonging to evergreen areas

The best kind of projects to delegate are those that are part of ongoing “evergreen” bodies of work (sort of the opposite of an isolated “one-off” project). The more evergreen the body of work, the more the learnings and domain experience gained from one project will translate directly into one’s ability to execute on related projects in the future (not just the technical experience, but the relationships they build with other cross-functional contributors as well). This means the up-front investment you make to delegate will yield an even bigger pay-off over time than it might for just a random “one-off” project.

Keep in mind, if you hoard a project that belongs to an evergreen problem space that you need to delegate eventually, the cost of delegating will increase since aside from what would have been the usual modest up-front delegation cost, you’ve also done a bunch of additional work that also needs to be sufficiently handed-off.

On the flip side, if you are already in the middle of a tactical one-off task (one that is unlikely to connect to any significant future work and with negligible learnings) then the longer-term benefit likely won’t outweigh the cost to delegate. In these cases, just hang onto it and power through (this should be an incredibly rare exception).

What else you can delegate

Most managers don’t realize that as your team matures you can even start delegating some of your administrative and coaching work to more seasoned members of your team. You should always be on the look-out for “lieutenants” that are best equipped to take on this kind of work. Not only will this free up more time for yourself, but it provides career and leadership development for senior members of your team and provides you with valuable insights on who might have what it takes to step into new leadership roles if/when they emerge (or even to succeed you in yours, should you decide to move on to another opportunity).

Sometimes the work you need to delegate doesn’t belong on your team’s plate. Find a constructive way to delegate and assign tasks to the right places even if that is the case (e.g. product, engineering, operations, analytics, or even a different team in the same field). Ask your lead for help if there is no clear path to finding the right home for a body of work. The worst thing you can do here is hang on to the work —your team probably won’t find it interesting enough to work on which means either it won’t get done, de-motivates someone on your team, or gets stuck with you. Remember if you hoard it, it will only make it harder to delegate later.

Accountability

Just because you’ve delegated the work it doesn’t mean you are off the hook. You are still responsible for tracking the progress of the work to ensure it gets done as well as providing whatever guidance is required for it to be done well. Depending on the nature of the work, it might be achieved using common project management tools, a light-weight Google doc, or regularly occurring check-ins to ensure that things are progressing. If you don’t create accountability and the work doesn’t get done, that is still on you.

Course correcting when delegation goes wrong

You aren’t going to get it right every time. You might over-estimate someone’s abilities, not fully understand the type of work they are interested in, or learn something about the project later that you didn’t know at the outset. In some cases, the person might have already formed an attachment to the work and won’t want to give it up (because they find it intellectually stimulating or recognize that it has a lot of internal visibility). In order to preserve morale but also ensure success, you can either choose to roll-up your sleeves and get more directly involved yourself (not ideal) or you can find another person on your team that can fill-in the skill gaps and ask them to plug in as a side-kick. Over time, either the first employee develops in the areas they were lacking and finds a way to succeed, or the work gravitates naturally towards the side-kick because they are the only one who possesses the necessary skills. In either case, after a while you can make an informed decision on whether it makes sense to have both people continue on the project or which of them you should roll off and onto other things.

Final thoughts

Delegation can feel unnatural at first but it is an absolutely critical skill to hone if you hope to take on more responsibilities and grow your team. Once you are able to master “letting go of the rope” the number of hours in a day will no longer limit your ability to take on more scope and make an outsized impact on your company.