A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about prioritization between important and urgent tasks. I could not write about this topic without mentioning the Eisenhower Matrix. We saw that urgent but not important tasks are ideal candidates for delegation.

Why is that?

As a leader from the middle, you cannot hold on to the body of work that you and your organization are supposed to deliver. It is not sustainable for you, and it limits your organization in delivering to its potential.

Delegation is an essential middle management tool.

Like a few topics that I already addressed in my previous blog posts, so much has been written about delegation.

What can I add more to this topic?

I can share my reflections on delegation through the lens of my middle manager journey.

I realized that I went through very distinctive periods. Those periods marked the steps in my transition – or transformation – from a young engineer who was given a middle management role to a more seasoned leader from the middle. I counted about four of them.

The first period corresponds to my first middle management role. For four years, I led a team of fifteen. Surely, I must have delegated some of my tasks. Indeed. But as I described in an earlier blog post, I was incredibly lucky to have a great mentor, Mark. Before he left the project, he built our delegation through the management system. Roles and responsibilities were clearly defined across the team. As we were working in a regulated industry sector, we had to identify and describe with an important level of granularity all the positions of the project organization. Our scope of work was also very clearly delineated. The biggest challenges were the peaks of workload due to many stop-and-go related to batched design approval from the Authorities and the customer. With a high predictability of the nature of the tasks, delegation has never been an issue. At least, not that I recall. And for that reason, I have delegated “passively” throughout this period, relying on the management system that was in place. In hindsight, I could have done more. I ended the project almost burnt out. I lacked the agility and courage to challenge the status quo. Probably because I was still very junior, I did not take It upon myself to change a system that was well-designed and did fulfill its purpose.

Lesson learned, yet, not implemented straight on…

The second period started when I changed company, workplace culture, and role. There I struggled with delegation. Or put in another way, I was bad at it. I knew something had to be done due to my previous experience, but not really what exactly. You might get lucky and have a boss or a mentor who can help you understand and practice delegation, but most of the time, you are on your own. And despite the general supportiveness of my line manager, I was indeed on my own. Further, the workplace culture was very transactional, which left little place for talking about soft skills and other leadership concepts. I made all the possible mistakes you can think of when it comes to delegation.

I can remember three distinctive ones:

• I kept for me all the work that I was good at and that I liked. This was still due to my relative lack of experience. As I came to this new organization with specific subject matter expertise, I saw that as a key differentiating factor. I suppose I was not keen on sharing it.

• I was very much into the details and was micromanaging. I remember feeling frustrated at times when a deliverable was not conforming exactly to the ideal product I had pictured in my mind. Because of that, I was fulfilling a self-predication that I could not trust those to whom I delegated a task because the results were not up to my expectations, and I should have to redo the work anyway. I now feel sorry for my team members to whom I frequently sent back documents full of mark-ups. Gosh… sorry guys…

• The last mistake was that I assumed that my expectations were communicated with clarity. Guess what…? That was not the case either. This one is not straightforward. I did not communicate everything in detail because I thought my team members would be able to connect the dots themselves, and that way, have a greater sense of ownership for the task. In that specific case and working in a very low context and transactional-based work cork culture, I was wrong. My colleagues were expecting detailed instructions so they could feel comfortable with the task and deliver to expectations, which of course was dear to their heart.

I do not want to paint a too bleak picture. We were doing well as a team, and we delivered solid results for our organization. But a better delegation would have made us stronger, and more productive and my team members could have developed even more.

The third period was the opposite of the second one. I joined another organization with a quite different culture, where power distance and high context prevailed. It is obvious to me as I write those lines, but it was not the case back then. I had a lot going on in my personal life, joining a new organization, and moving to another country. My emotional intelligence bandwidth was significantly reduced. To add to the context, I was the youngest in the organization I led. All the team members were seasoned and worked in the industry longer than I did. As a result, I delegated scopes and tasks based on the wrong assumptions. What I did not realize – and of course was not told when I got hired – was that the department was not delivering according to expectations. I started my new role by delegating much more deliberately. But trying to use the learnings from my previous experience, I did not allow myself to be involved as much as I should have. I trusted the team based on the assumptions and beliefs I had about their capabilities and performance. A few months into the role, it became starkly clear that I was once again wrong. I did implement the lessons learned from my previous experience, but I missed the fact that I was now in a different context. Once the reality check was done, we took drastic actions to reorganize the team. This had a positive impact on the department’s morale and performance.

My fourth period started when I transitioned from the nuclear industry to renewables. I not only changed the industry sector, but I was once again in a low context and transactional work culture. Did I learn from all my previous mistakes? I would like to think I did. Like a pendulum, after going from one extreme to the other, it has now stabilized in the middle. It is not perfect, but I certainly improve.

Those four periods did not start and end with a specific date but were intertwined, with blurry transitions. Like many of the middle management topics I wrote about, I practiced and experimented with delegation until it became a more intentional and controlled process.

As I prepared this article, I gathered the main benefits of delegation which every leader from the middle should keep in mind.

• Productivity – Remember, workload distribution and organization are key middle management tasks. Without it, you will not only struggle because you are continuously stretched beyond your capacity, but your department will deliver below its potential.

• Time management – This goes hand in hand with the distribution of the workload. Delegation will enable delivering multiple tasks in parallel rather than one after the other. This will free up the time required for the leaders from the middle to focus on high-value tasks and strategic planning.

• Team members development – By sharing your workload with your team members, you expose them to work, tasks, or stakeholders outside their initial scope of responsibility. Stepping outside the comfort zone is the ideal way to develop new skills and potential.

• Trust – By deliberately delegating work to your organization, you convey a strong message of confidence. Your belief in your team members’ autonomy and decision-making will build trust among them.

• Flexibility and adaptability – By sharing responsibilities across, you leverage the diversity of your organization. As your team members gain experience in different roles, they become more versatile. Your department is not subject anymore to any single point of failure. You enhance the overall resilience of your organization.

• Team morale – Overall, as your team works to its full potential, it will yield greater achievements – that you can share. This will enhance the team’s morale – and it will look good on you.   

If delegation has numerous fantastic benefits, it is not always easy to implement effectively. It is very context-dependent. One size does not fit all…

Nonetheless, by putting some structure into delegating, you can prevent some of the mistakes I made.

Step 1: Select the task you want to delegate.

As with every first step, this is probably the most important one. When looking at the Eisenhower Matrix, we have seen that urgent but not important tasks can be delegated. I gave examples of typical middle management urgent tasks. That can be used as a starting point.

Jenny Blake (2017, How to Decide Which Tasks to Delegate – Harvard Business Review) proposes another way to identify good candidates for delegation. She describes this method as an audit of the six Ts. You should consider six characteristics to help you decide whether to delegate a task or not: tiny, tedious, time-consuming, teachable, terrible at, and time-sensitive.

Jessy Sostrin (2017, To Be a Great Leader, You Have to Learn to Delegate Well – Harvard Business Review) reminds the importance of saying no when your boss or a colleague asks you to take on a new project or assignment if this is not a strategic fit for your organization. That way, you spare yourself from an unnecessary delegation and your department from the strain of additional workload.

Whichever method you use, be clear on which task you want to delegate.

Step 2: Select the right person for the task.

Even though this seems obvious, delegating a task to a team member who does not have the potential, competence, or even the affinity to deliver it will put both of you unnecessarily in trouble. We determined that delegation provides great development opportunities. But that does not mean that by just delegating, a person with no experience in the matter will somehow figure everything out, develop themselves, and deliver to your expectations from the get-go. Your assessment of the competency gap will govern your involvement and support moving forward. Consider the work capacity of the individual you would like to delegate the task. They might be the right person, but it might not be the right moment. Again, it is in your mutual interest not to overload your team members as it will backfire on both of you.

Note that it requires you to have a good knowledge of your organization. Investing in relationships should not start when you need them… It will be too late.

Step 3: Set clear expectations.

As you are about to brief your team member about the task you want to delegate, I would advise you to start by explaining why this task is important and what unique opportunity it represents. Without a clear purpose, it may be difficult to be inspired.

As you gave the context for the task to be delegated, you now have to be as clear as possible on all the expectations: scope of their contribution, timeline for the deliverables, templates to be used, format to follow… Exhaustivity might seem overkill, but based on my experience, you would rather give too much information than not enough.

Get confirmation that the information and instructions you gave have been well received and understood.

Make it easy, simply ask: Is everything clear? Am I missing something? Does it make sense? Do you have any questions?

Step 4: Empowerment and trust.

Step back and let them own and deliver the task.

Step 5: Monitor.

Depending on your assessment at step 2, you need to find the right mix of intervention, support, and engagement.

As you want – and need – to monitor the progress and quality of the task, you do not want to micromanage or not support your team members should they need your help.

It can be a difficult balance to find. In that case, again, you should keep it simple and ask: How can I help? Any problem with which I could help? Any hurdles I could remove?

Step 6: Provide feedback and recognition.

Feedback should be provided continuously, commensurate with the level of engagement you agreed on with your team members. But do not wait until the end to unpack all the pieces of advice and improvement opportunities you noticed along the way.

Celebrate successes and accomplishments! Not only the task if it has been delivered effectively, but especially the effort and development your team members have made throughout the process.

With positive reinforcement, your team's potential, confidence, and capabilities will grow exponentially.

Step 7: You remain accountable.

Whether the delegation was successful or not, you are accountable. It is all on you!

Especially at the beginning of a working relationship or with a more junior team member, take time to debrief the entire process: What went well? What could have been done better? By you, by your team member? Next time you decide to delegate a task to this person, what will be different?

Those seven steps have nothing to do with rocket science.

However, delegation does require deliberate practice. Like any other leadership skill, it will take time before you master it. Even if I have learned from my mistakes and I now delegate regularly, I must always make sure that I do not become complacent. It is easy to make a judgment error in one of the seven steps or simply skip one.

Step 5 is the most important one, as it can help adjust and recalibrate the delegated task or project if you or your team member face challenges.

There are two more ideas I would like to share.

The first one is that delegation should not be used to exert power and claim leadership status. I have seen it done and experienced it myself multiple times. This is the archetype of how not to delegate. If done too often, it will result in frustration and disengagement from those who are subject to delegation.

The second one, to end on a positive note, is the reflection that the seven steps for delegation seem to be the ideal recipe for establishing cooperation between departments. In the case for leading from the middle, we saw that facilitation, networking, and interface management are key to effective middle management. Building coalitions throughout your organization to resolve complex problems is essential for resilient and high-performing companies. By implementing the same process, you can collaborate in a structured and transparent way with other parts of your working organization. For your benefit, the benefit of your department, and the benefit of your company overall.

Next time you are about to embark on a project with another department, consider the seven steps and build an engagement plan with your counterpart for setting up your respective teams for success.

What is your experience with delegation?  

Come and share it on The Middle Management Anonymous Agora, our podcast!

You can also contact me directly and engage with The Middle Management Anonymous community!

As always, I will be happy to get your comments and feedback.