8 ways leaders delegate successfully
The one Harvard Business Review article I’ve sent to everyone and keep revisiting over and over
Arts County Fair, sometime in the early 2000s. Being part of the crew made me realize that I love working on experiences that make people excited.
I was a big nerd about extracurriculars growing up. In high school, I did all the dorky things like public speaking, debate team, yearbook photography, and youth parliament. I went on to participate in a bajillion clubs and organizations in my undergrad:
getting elected to the Arts Undergraduate Society (hey, this was objectively cool because we put on a massive charity benefit concert every year that filled the outdoor stadium with thousands of festival-goers)
getting myself appointed as VP of the inaugural Sociology and Anthropology Student Society (we were pretty new, but managed to make friends and sell great sweatpants)
pioneering the advent of large format full-coloured campus event posters, ushering out the photocopied letter-sized postings that were common at the time
taking part in a student-directed seminar where we designed our own for-credit course revolving around empowerment and art for social change
A stereotypical liberal arts student through and through, I never could’ve predicted that a decade or two later I would be obsessed with the Harvard Business Review.
Maybe it’s no surprise, though, because what I like the most about it are the topics about how people work together.
I’ve read a few of their books like “New Managers” and “Change Management” from the “10 Must Reads” series, and I see them a few times in airport kiosks where I sneakily flip through them while I’m waiting. Online, there’s one article in particular that I keep going back to: 8 Ways Leaders Delegate Successfully.
Moving from an individual contributor role into a management role can be a lesson in letting go. When you’re used to doing everything yourself and have been doing so for years, it feels like you’re losing control while gaining more responsibilities.
On top of that, since there can be a lot of feelings around the term “manager” (I think almost everyone has had at least one really awful manager) it’s always been important to me to have a good working relationship with the people that I hire and spend many hours with from Monday to Friday.
To summarize:
They pick the right person
They’re clear about the responsibilities and how much autonomy they have
They describe the desired results in detail
They make sure team members have the resources they need
They establish checkpoints and milestones for feedback
They encourage new, creative ways to accomplish goals
They create a motivating environment
They tolerate risks and mistakes and use them as learning opportunities
I’ve found these “8 ways” to be a great guideline for career and growth-related conversations with direct reports and I developed a few 1-on-1 templates based on these practices. It goes well beyond delegating, and I’ve found myself considering these practices when I think about how I want to shape the working environment. This is especially important in a start-up environment where there may not yet be much in the way of formal tracks. In particular:
Growth: building in time for people to learn and develop their skills
Support: making sure they have enough resources and time to do what they need to do
Check-ins: establishing an individual cadence that works well to avoid both micromanaging or a lack of guidance
They also apply to work itself:
Autonomy: defining the amount of freedom to explore and be creative
Results: clarity of the purpose and expectations
Success: what it looks like when it’s done well
While I’ve rarely had trouble trusting team members, it can be hard to implement these practices when time is running out. But like most processes, fine-tuning them isn’t always linear and all of these are micro-exercises in increasing risk tolerance as well as building trust in both directions.