Delegating effectively is the key to building a successful business. It’s also something that is done surprisingly rarely. In fact, the world seems full of individuals who either can’t let go at all, or let go of all the wrong things.
The results can be disastrous, but they include inefficiency in execution, employee churn, poor decision making - and more. Large well established companies can usually paper over these cracks (for a while at least). Start-ups most definitely can’t.
The penalty for bad management in small companies is death (of the company, let’s not get too carried away here). And at the core of good management is understanding what to delegate and how.
Let’s explore why that’s true.
Kinds Of Work
Broadly speaking there are three kinds of work involved in most businesses:
Strategic: figuring out what the goals and brand values of the company are. In broad terms, what product development and go-to-market look and feel like.
Tactical: establishing what specific pieces of work should be done, and when, to deliver on the strategy.
Execution: actually doing things.
The first thing to point out is that unless you are consciously doing all these types of work, something is wrong. And don’t think I haven’t met plenty of companies who ‘do things’ at random or (possibly worse) spend large amounts of time polishing corporate strategy decks and none at all working on the old rubber/road interface.
The second is that by thinking about work in this way we can start to be more analytical when it comes to thinking about how to delegate within the organisation - which is the focus of the rest of this piece.
The Importance Bottom-Up Decision Making
I’ll skip the pre-amble and get straight to the point. Effective delegation gives the employee as much control as possible over their working day and the decisions that affect it.
Or to put it another way, you should allow each individual to own as much of the strategic/tactical/execution pyramid as possible.
This can be difficult for some managers, who fall into the trap of believing that one person makes the decisions, and another goes and makes them happen - and that this is what effective delegation looks like.
But it doesn’t work for a variety of reasons:
It cuts the organisation off from a huge amount of experience and knowledge. Who knows more about trends in display advertising: a CEO or a professional who is on that coal face every day? Usually the latter. But determining strategy and tactics from the top down stops the business getting the benefit of that understanding.
It makes it hard to allocate responsibility. Is success related to great tactical decision making, or outstanding execution? And is failure a sign someone did a bad job, or made the best of a bad job? If you split tactics and execution, it is harder to know.
Employees don’t grow. If employees are focused only on execution and are not exposed to the decision making side of the business, it is harder to develop the leaders of tomorrow.
Employee satisfaction suffers. People like to have input into how they spend their day and they like to feel they are being listened to. When they don’t bad things happen.
Bottom line almost every medium to large company in the world is stuffed full of young people who know full well that what they are being asked to do doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, and if given the chance could add a whole lot more value than they do.
We end up with CXOs mandating tactics when they have a very limited understanding of the specific requirements of the situation and are in fact actively undermining their own organisation.
Why this happens is also pretty easy to understand. It’s really easy to delegate boring repetitive work. It is harder to let go of the more ‘sexy’ business of tactical and strategic decision making. But it can be done.
Tips For Letting Go
Before delegating for the sake of it, consider your end goal.
The correct state to be in is to have a named individual responsible for both a particular metric (for example, new inbound leads) and the tactics and execution that will deliver it.
This is what true autonomy looks like. The right people thrive under it - and so does your business.
So the first step is to hire the right people. Be fussy. Don’t look for someone who will do what they are told, but for someone who knows more about the subject than you. If you have no confidence in the team, you cannot delegate.
Second, be clear about expectations. Make sure employees are aware of any relevant targets and objectives (define them together), and be clear about what budget is available to them.
The third step is to listen and encourage open communication. My message to team members usually runs something like this:
“You are free to do your job as you wish with the budget and resources you have. But any time you feel you need advice or just a conversation about anything, let’s talk”
I think it is vital to encourage communication initiated by the employee rather than the other way around. The former is a request for help or advice, the latter too easily turns into one person telling the other what to do - and people don’t grow in that way.
Lastly: have confidence. Step away from the day to day, and be ready to let small things pass. Aside from anything else - what looks like a mistake to you might be the right thing to do.
Allow team members and employees to contribute to strategic thinking. Bring people into the fold and allow everyone to contribute. If nothing else, you will soon learn who is ready for greater responsibility.
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