
Whether to delegate - ColinWright
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2013/12/30/whether-to-delegate/
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dworin
I really like this model and framework - most people underestimate the impact
of transaction costs, and I think it's partially why many companies
overestimate the value they'll get from outsourcing.

But in the real world, I've worked with dozens of leaders and professionals,
and I don't think I've ever seen someone with an over-delegation problem,
where they had handed off too many tasks that they should have been doing
themselves. Most have the opposite problem: mistakenly believing that
delegation will take longer, or will result in lower quality work.

Delegation doesn't just help the person delegating, it helps the person
receiving the work as well. It gives other people the opportunity to handle
new challenges, feel ownership over their work, learn new skills, and apply
what they're good at.

~~~
socalnate1
"But in the real world, I've worked with dozens of leaders and professionals,
and I don't think I've ever seen someone with an over-delegation problem"

Couldn't agree more. I actually think our brains tend to over inflate the
transaction costs, not ignore them completely.

~~~
johndcook
I've seen leaders who don't delegate but abdicate. They hand over a project
completely, refusing to make decisions that only they are authorized to make.
It's as if they're saying "Guess! And if it turns out poorly, I can say I
never told you to do whichever course you take."

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InclinedPlane
Another important factor that took me a while to learn and be comfortable
with: successful delegation is not the same as defect free delegation.

People will make mistakes. They will do so even if they are competent and you
were well justified in delegating a task to them. Nevertheless, screwups are
going to happen, and sometimes it'll be something that is beyond the
capabilities of the person you delegated the task to deal with.

But it's a mistake to think of these things as failures of delegation, or to
use them as an excuse to curtail responsibilities. Delegating properly
requires a holistic view. One of the fundamental problems of people who micro-
manage or are incapable of delegating is that there will always be fuckups,
thus there will always be excuses to do it yourself instead of delegating. But
this is because we're comparatively blind to our own fuckups, which we see as
recoverable and due to things beyond our control whereas the temptation is to
see other people's fuckups as due solely to incompetence.

If nothing ever seems to be going wrong that may actually be a sign that
you're not delegating enough. The trick is finding the right balance.

~~~
thirdtruck
Seconded. I had to delegate the production of cover art for my recent novel,
as I could not even pretend to overestimate my art skills. Even then, I
managed to let a major error (likely a failure of instruction) get through,
which will require one more editorial task for me.

~~~
InclinedPlane
I suppose the corollary of this is that you have to make sure you put in place
quality control checkpoints so you can make sure delegated work is done
correctly. This sort of thing tends to be ignored when you do something
yourself because you'll usually do simple double-checks to verify the work
you've done as a matter of course.

~~~
thirdtruck
Makes sense. I look forward to figuring out how to apply TDD- and BDD-like
methodologies to non-software processes.

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tunesmith
This distantly reminds me of [http://xkcd.com/1205/](http://xkcd.com/1205/) ,
the saving time comic. When I looked at it, I noticed that the time durations
surprised me, in that spending time automating (which can be compared to
finding someone to delegate to) is often more worth the time than I would have
intuitively felt.

I'm not sure if that's just a personality thing, or if people in general are
more liable to not-delegate-when-they-should, than delegate-when-they-
shouldn't.

~~~
thirdtruck
Agreed. I might have spent the better part of three or four full work-days
refactoring some code at work, but that was only after we spent a _week_ of QA
time and my own error-fixing time, all because I had not insisted on such
refactoring in the first place. Never mind the time we will save going forward
replacing in-browser tests with controller-level unit tests.

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mathattack
Good post. I like the ideas of managing energy, in addition to time. In a
similar vein, one has to manage their focus too. This means delegating things
so that one can focus on other things. (Or more correctly, delegate and
monitor if that takes less attention than doing or actively managing)

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im3w1l
I think corporations are similar to supercomputers. For instance delegation
makes a lot of sense in embarrassingly parallel tasks, but can sometimes be
for the worse if it means excessive io.

~~~
mathattack
If you mean communication by io, then yes, this holds. Similar to parallel
computing design, there are organization design principles to minimize
handoffs. For instance designing work and organization so that larger tasks
can still be handled by individual organizational units.

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danielharan
I'd like to start delegating more. Any suggestions of things to try? What have
you found most useful?

