Delegation is an essential practice for managers. In any organization, one of the vital functions of management is to distribute and coordinate work among the group. However, delegating well requires understanding what delegation is and isn’t. Here are three common delegation myths that effective managers don’t fall prey to.
Myth #1: Any Work a Manager has Someone Else Do Involves Delegation
One misunderstanding is that any time a manager has someone else do some work, they’re delegating. This ignores the difference between work allocation and delegation. Many managers must decide who does what work. In a team-oriented environment, they might do this by determining each team’s mission or allocating people to teams. More individually-oriented organizations have managers assign projects to specific individuals. Some managers handle job design – determining what duties are handled by what roles. In these different ways, managers allocate work to people and people to work.
What distinguishes work allocation from delegation is whose job the work would normally be part of. Delegation involves work that would normally be the manager’s. An engineering manager deciding which engineers will be part of which teams isn’t delegating because the work of those teams isn’t work the manager would typically do. Similarly, a marketing manager assigning a research project to a marketing specialist isn’t delegating – unless that research is something that would normally be part of the manager’s job. As a manager, if you’re asking someone to do something you would expect a person in their role to do – rather than something you would do yourself – you’re allocating work, not delegating.
Managing involves getting work done through others, and delegation is critical. However, not everything that managers have other people do involves delegating.
Myth #2: Delegation Is a Way to Hand-off Tasks
As a manager, if you’re offloading tasks to your employees to use their labor but not their thinking, you’re not delegating. Just as work allocation isn’t delegation, another common type of “false delegation” is task assignment.
Task assignment is when you, as a manager, hand off a small, self-contained piece of work to one of your direct reports – usually with instructions on how to do it. Tasks are generally one-off undertakings rather than the ongoing responsibilities of work allocation. When you say, “Go do this thing this way and report back when you’re done,” you’re probably assigning tasks.
Crucially, task assignment involves minimal decision-making by the person assigned the task. This contrasts with delegation, where you explicitly hand some of your decision-making authority to the other person. Delegation involves describing desired outcomes and applicable constraints, and then letting the other person make relevant decisions. Consequently, if you’re telling them the steps to follow, you’re probably not delegating.
Assigning tasks can be sensible in some instances. However, it also runs a substantial risk of feeling like micromanagement. This risk increases if the other person has any experience at all in this area. Effective managers understand the difference between task assignment and delegation and use each appropriately. They know when to give explicit instructions and when to engage someone else’s thinking, not just their labor.
Myth #3: Delegation is “All or Nothing”
Managers who believe this myth often face a dilemma. They believe that delegation gives them only two choices: Delegate or don’t. This kind of thinking is a trap. Delegation involves handing over part of your job and giving someone decision-making authority — but it’s not all or nothing.
When you consider delegating a large project or set of responsibilities to someone, you may think, “This person isn’t ready for all of this.” You may be correct, but that doesn’t mean you can’t delegate any of it. You can start delegating sections of it – pieces larger than tasks and requiring real decision-making – while keeping the remaining parts. As the other person demonstrates the ability to manage those sections, you can shift more of the remainder to them. Eventually, you’ve delegated the whole thing, even though you didn’t start that way.
Imagine you’re a Talent Development manager who runs a twice-yearly leadership development retreat for emerging managers in your organization. Part of the project you’re responsible for is selecting a date and location. You’d like to delegate this to one of your employees. You also know that dealing with Legal and Procurement for the necessary contracts is complicated. You don’t think this is something they can handle right now.
Rather than keep the whole thing yourself, you ask your direct report to research and make a proposal for the date and location. You establish some constraints (time of year, dates to avoid, budget, geographic area, etc.) and specify what information you need to handle the contracting phase. (This is how you avoid playing Bring Me A Rock.)You tell them you plan to stress test their recommendation, but as long as they work within those constraints unless something unforeseen happens, you’ll go with what they decide. By doing this, you’ve delegated a part of the overall site selection process they can handle and started preparing them for the rest.
Some managers think, “If I can’t delegate the whole thing to someone, I might as well do it myself.” Handing off less than 100% means you need to coordinate, and coordination always has costs. Effective managers see this as an investment in their people – one that pays dividends over time.
Use All Three Modes Appropriately
All three of these ways of working through others – work allocation, task assignment, and delegation – are legitimate uses of a manager’s authority. Effective managers avoid these delegation myths and use all three modes appropriately.
Work allocation functions best when managers don’t make decisions in a vacuum and are open to influence. Like any organizational decision, deciding who works on what or is part of what team can be done in various ways, from highly distributed to entirely autocratic. As a manager, you might use self-selection, asking employees their preferences, presenting a proposal to them for their approval, or simply informing them what they’ll be working on. Managers often don’t realize what options they have, so they don’t necessarily choose the best method for work allocation in their situation.
Task assignment works best when it’s obvious what needs to be done, and there’s little upside or downside to how someone chooses to do it. The more instructions you give an employee about performing a task, the more they’re likely to feel like you are micromanaging them. The other key thing about task assignment is to be clear that it isn’t delegation. An unfortunate number of managers think they do a lot of delegating when, in fact, they’re assigning their people a lot of tasks. Working like this gets things done but rarely develops people’s capabilities.
Delegation is the least intuitive of the three for most people. It requires that the person you’re delegating to has demonstrated an appropriate degree of competence. It also requires you to be clear about what you want them to achieve and the constraints you need them to operate within. And it means giving up a degree of control over work you would normally do yourself. It’s not always the most appropriate choice. Delegation is often a challenge for managers who are experts in their area. When done well, it develops both you and the person you’re delegating to.
