One of the most emotionally challenging aspects of leading teams is delegation.
On the surface, it sounds quite simple. Just assign the task to someone else.
However, in order to delegate work to someone else, you must relinquish your control and put trust in someone else to handle the task. You need to confront your concerns about failure, or come to grips with whether or not anything less than what you could do on your own would be acceptable. You have to consider what it would mean to your reputation if you don't do the work yourself, or the end product doesn't measure up.
All of this is remarkably difficult, and the primary reason why many managers routinely find themselves saying "I'll just handle it this time and delegate it next time." Sadly, next time often never comes.
Mastering delegation is important. But that's not what we're going to talk about today because I don't want to waste your time reiterating that you have limited time, can't do everything, and need to leverage the strength of your team to increase your chances of long term success.
Instead, I want to illuminate the three different types of delegators, in hopes that you can find their motivations inside of you.
Delegation Motivation: Boss Style
Motto: Do as little as possible.
"The boss" knows how to delegate work, and their reasoning is simple: the boss is in charge, the workers do the work. At some point, this type of manager was probably encouraged by their manager to delegate more work...and they took it to heart.
Here's the message that they received.
A boss has a neatly designed role with a pay grade. Anything below that pay grade is a waste of time and should be handed off. Workers do the work and Managers manage, right?
Any manager motivated by their status and rank, who sees work as something to be done by their laborers, will likely adopt this delegation motivation. Over time, it becomes a game of "how-much-work-can-I-push-off-to-my-subordinates-and-get-away-with-it." Their ultimate goal is to be able to do nothing, except tell others what to do. If they could hire a project manager to do that and report back in, well that would be even a little bit better.
This isn't so much delegation as an abdication of responsibility due to a superiority complex.
Delegation Motivation: Manager Style
Motto: We all need to work together to get it all done.
A good manager sees their role as keeping everything in balance and moving forward.
Delegation for the collaborative manager is about making sure everyone is supporting one another to get everything done.
It's a sort of puzzle to be solved.
When one person has too much on their plate, some of the load should be moved from one resource to another. The best managers here see themselves as part of this collaborative process, sharing the same commitment to the work as they expect from their team members.
This sort of delegation is motivated by balance and is undertaken in service of the work.
Delegation Motivation: Leadership Style
Motto: We need a team of leaders so everyone's growth is a top priority.
Leaders delegate for two reasons.
The work isn't handed-off because the leader is lazy and doesn't want to work. It's not handed-off purely because a resource is available. The key difference is that work that is being delegated is not being handed down, it's work that invites people up.
Distinguishing
Let's say you have a team of 5 people that work under you. 2 of those are directly below you, and the other 3 are below them. Every month, you have to deliver a report to