I talk a lot about these shocking stats from Forbes magazine: 60% of managers fail within 24 months. And 90% of managers never receive foundational training.
This really fuels me. Can you imagine running a professional football team that doesn’t help its quarterback improve?
Then again, the best quarterbacks in the game drive their own self-development. So, on the flip side, if companies are as bad at training as the Forbes data suggests, we can easily differentiate ourselves by developing ourselves.
I hear a lot of talk about “not blocking and tackling” describing execution issues in business. “Blocking and tackling” is a football analogy. It’s criticizing a group who are not applying the fundamentals.
You know, the foundational training so few businesses are teaching.
My aim in this newsletter is to compensate for the foundational training 90% of managers don’t get. This is the newsletter I wish I had 15 years ago.
So I’m going to spend the next several issues on fundamentals.
🧠 Today’s Framework: Delegation
📚The Story
It’s amazing how few leaders delegate well. I didn’t learn this skill early enough, I succeeded without it until I didn’t.
It worked when I became the lead of a team that had been together for a long time. They did not need to be delegated to, they knew how to do everything. All they needed were decisions and they’d take the ball from there.
I had inherited the mythical High-Performing Team. This is very rare.
When I moved from being a technical leader to a business leader I really struggled. I found Steven Drotter’s work on The Performance Pipeline.
The Performance Pipeline describes how to design the vertical dimension of an organizational structure. Drotter divides the vertical structure into 6 “passages” between Individual Contributor and CEO. At each passage a new set of fundamental skills is required in order to deliver that layer’s results. By completing each passage, you incrementally build these skills making the next passage easier (Crawl-Walk-Run).
This book allowed me to troubleshoot my own performance challenge.
I was at Passage 4 “Business Leader” but I did not complete my Passage 2 “Manager of Others” development.
My development deficiency: Delegation.
Don’t skip this foundational skill. It’s not that hard to learn, and it’s a lot easier to practice when the stakes are lower!
🧠The Framework: Delegation 101: Vision, Resources, Definition of Done
Prepare:
Decide what to delegate and who to delegate to?
When you don’t delegate, you run out of daylight and your team runs out of work.
Decide what to delegate
You can delegate:
- Recurring tasks
- Action Items
- Projects
- Departments
- a Business Unit
So – knock down the barrier, and get some stuff on someone else’s plate.
Decide who to delegate to:
What team skills should I be leveraging?
Know your team including strengths and weaknesses
What team skills should I be developing?
Understand who wants to learn what.
Understand what the future may look like.
Develop the relevant team skills, the intersection of 1 & 2
An action item to some may be a project to others.
Ask me to make pizza, that’s an action for me, I’ve made thousands. We’re leveraging a skill.
Ask my 4 year old to make an pizza, that’s a project for her. We’re developing a skill. It is a worthwhile skill to develop, but success will require a different kind of support infrastructure.
Your team are no different. You want your team to be better next year than they are this year.
As always, balance growth and execution.
Once you’ve decided what to delegate and to whom, you’ll follow these five steps:
- Describe the task
- Give Context
- Define Parameters
- Vision of the future when completed
- Clear level of authority
I’ll describe these in detail:
1. Describe the task
This involves giving a precise and succinct overview of the task or project that needs to be completed. It includes a description of the intended outcome to set the direction and scope.
Start with a verb:
“Submit the quarterly financial report to the finance department by July 15th.”
Is better than:
“Quarterly financial report due to the finance department by July 15th.”
The difference is the verb.
This clarity and ownership are important to establish at the outset.
When this isn’t done well, your people hand you the wrong thing.
Or they tug at your shirt to ask lots of follow up questions.
That will still happen as you improve this skill, and as you and your team learn how to communicate with each other.
2. Give Context
This step requires explaining the ‘why’ behind the task.
Providing context helps team members understand the importance and purpose of the project, which can enhance their commitment and quality of execution.
Connect to the larger thing.
If in Step 1 you say “Bake a cake for tomorrow’s dinner. It’s got to be a really really good cake.”
But in Step 2 you say “The Queen is coming over tomorrow.”
YES – I’ve got to make a really really good cake.
People want to be connected to something larger.
But doing this well also helps the task owner fill in gaps in your incomplete delegation language.
“Book a venue for our quarterly offsite by July 31. Our quarterly offsite is an important time to build our teamwork, to focus on a tough problem, and to get reengaged in our Mission/Vision/Values statement.”
3. Define Parameters
Setting parameters involves defining the boundaries and specific conditions under which the task should be completed. This can include budgets, resources, and any specific methodologies or processes to follow.
The offsite shall have:
- plenty of wall space or windows for a Post-It based workshop.
- TV/Screen to project slides
- fit 10 people comfortably with desk or table space for all.
- Coffee and food available either on the premises or brought in.
- outdoor space.
- $1000 for the day
Do not use XYZ because it just did not work last time.
💡Tip: Specify boundaries like budget and resources. Be explicit about what should and should not be done, which helps prevent misunderstandings and sets clear boundaries.
4. Vision of the future when completed
Describing the Vision of the Future means detailing what success looks like for the task.
It helps clarify expectations and enables delegates to envision the end result accurately.
Paint the picture of success! THIS is what we all participate in! THIS is what you are enabling!
Example:
“The venue is booked on time, within budget, all meeting details arranged, and the environment is comfortable for full team engagement, and we all walk out engaged, refreshed, aligned and reinvigorated for the next quarter.”
5. Clear level of authority
This involves specifying the level of decision-making authority that the delegate has. Michael Hyatt uses five levels of delegation to clarify this.
- Level 1: Do exactly as instructed without deviation.
- Level 2: Gather information and report back.
- Level 3: Research, propose options, and recommend a course of action.
- Level 4: Decide and inform the delegator of the action taken.
- Level 5: Full autonomy to make decisions without needing to report back unless requested.
This clarity helps prevent overstepping and ensures that delegates feel empowered yet accountable.
This will change as you both develop trust in each other.
The trust in how you’ve described your expectations, and the trust in their level of skills to execute.
Tying it all together:
1. Description
Book a venue for our quarterly offsite by July 31.
2. Context
Our quarterly offsite is an important time to build our teamwork, to focus on a tough problem, and to get reengaged in our Mission/Vision/Values statement.
3. Parameters
- The offsite shall have plenty of wall space or windows for a Post-It based workshop.
- TV/Screen to project slides
- fit 10 people comfortably with desk or table space for all.
- Coffee and food available either on the premises or brought in.
- outdoor space.
- $1000 for the day
- Do not use XYZ because it just did not work last time.
4. Vision of the future
The venue is booked on time, within budget, all meeting details arranged, and the environment is comfortable for full team engagement, and we all walk out engaged, refreshed, aligned and reinvigorated for the next quarter.
5. Level of authority
Decide and inform me of your choice (Level 4).
- I’ve designed complex systems on multi-year projects my entire career. I’ve designed the helicopter flight deck for a new class of Navy Ship. The first pencil hit paper in 2007, and we built our first ship in 2012.
- I ran a pizza shop with my sister while I was in college. That required making dough, sauce, pizza, cleaning up. That happened with a team, and so delegation was constant.
The framework above is useful in both cases – pizza and complex projects. The only thing that changes it the form of the delegation.
The Delegation Spectrum (in development)
I’ve not seen anybody else write about this. I’m starting to built this concept of a Delegation Spectrum. As the task being delegated gets more complex, the form of the delegation itself gets more formal.
Even though the complexity increases, the three questions above do not change. Only the level of the formality and the number of words used to answer the three questions changes.
If someone has seen a model like this, please reply and save me the time!
Why the hesitation?
People naturally hestitate because their team cannot do the thing as well as they could personally. But – we’ve got to recognize management work is different than individual work. We have to do the management work.
Here’s a 1 minute video of Bill Gates talking about this with Dax Shepard on Armchair Expert.
“At first I wrote all the code. Then I hired the people who wrote the code and I looked at the code. Eventually there was code I didn’t look at written by people I didn’t hire. The whole time the quality of the code was going down, but the ability to have big impact was going up.” – Bill Gates
Bottom Line – you need to empower your team and start looking further forward. This isn’t that complex, you just need to practice.
Start to make this shift, and you’ll be in the 40% of managers who succeed. Congratulations!
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