Delegation: Two Out of Three Managers Get This Wrong

You are busier than everyone who reports to you, and somewhere along the way you decided that is leadership. 

My Mother Ran the Show. We Ran Our Roles.

My mother was the kind of high achiever the makes the rest of us quake. Accomplished pianist. Talented artist. Excellent writer. Birth mother to four, stepmother to more. She founded two businesses, one of which supplied silk floral arrangements and catering to parties of several hundred people. 

For most of it she was a one-woman machine. But a party that size needs help, so there was hired staff, and there were also four children. We got roped in early and we were given specific responsibilities and the autonomy to own them.

She knew the catering process end to end, so she knew when something was out of place. She was available for guidance and support. She was not hovering. She was off running the elite orchestration that only she could run.

That is delegation.

The Version That Masquerades as Trust

Now compare that to an executive I reported to.

Accomplished senior leaders reported into them, and each of us ran a massive piece of the division. We were allowed to do our own thing, to say what we planned and how it aligned to divisional strategy, and to self-report on whether it was working.

Unlike my mother, this executive did not know the detail of the business. They made best efforts to question and analyze, but they were relying on each of us to know and do what we individually thought was best. If we failed, we were on our own. If we needed guidance, we went and found it somewhere else. If one of us had left, they would have been guessing at how to keep the department running.

That is not delegation. It's not trust. It's leadership abdication.

And this is what we do to our teams, too. We hand over the work, call it trust, and remove ourselves from the part where we were supposed to still be useful.

Leading the Work Is Different From Doing the Work

I know an SVP of sales at a manufacturing company who told me straight out that he could make that company a lot more money if he did not have to spend so much time on his team. He meant it. He is not lazy and he is not cold. He is very good at selling, which is what he knows and enjoys. Anything outside of sales activity he considers a waste of time, so his team is essentially a tax he feels that he pays in order to be the SVP. 

I know a COO who is exhausted by the pile of work on her plate but does not believe her team is mature enough to take on more. She explains the objective, leaves them to it, comes back, and it is not what she wanted. So they go back to the drawing board, she gets tired of the cycle, and she picks up the work and does it herself. Then she sits everyone down and rushes through what she did, summarizing, believing she is teaching them. She is not. Because she did it herself, they never got the chance to learn. 

Most leaders are well-intentioned. They will put effort toward developing people. But when time pressure gets heavy, they pick up the work, because nobody ever taught them that leading the work is different from doing the work. And, there are the opposites, the ones that don't know how or don't want to put in the effort, and they delegate by passing everything off their plate to others.

John Hunt at London Business School studied this for years. About 30% of managers believe they delegate well. Of that 30%, their own teams rate only one in three as good at delegation. So for every manager who is sure they delegate, two out of three are wrong.

When Gallup looked at fast-growing companies, the leaders who were strong delegators grew faster and brought in more revenue than the ones who held on. Delegation is not you being generous. It is you refusing to be the ceiling that caps your people.

Collaboration Is Not the Cure for Bad Delegation

Once managers see how hard delegation is to get right, the reflex is to have everyone collaborate all the time. Most managers are blurring the two already. They stay knee-deep in everything, call it collaboration, and become the bottleneck. Or they fling a messy shared problem at a team, call it delegation, and watch it fall apart.

Researchers at the University of Virginia and Wharton collaborated, comically, on a study of collaboration, published in Harvard Business Review. They found we have built messy categories for collaborative work: email and messaging, meetings, team assignments, and groupthink used to soften accountability.

The result is that most people get too busy, and the most competent, most helpful people burn out because they get pulled into everything. You know exactly who that person is in your organization. Their calendar is always full. They want to help. They are the person we harm most.

Quality collaboration is not coordination and it is not looping people in. Collaboration is sharing a problem where no single person knows the whole answer. If one person can own it and solve it, that is delegation. Done.

Scope the problem before you gather anyone. Use the fewest people possible. Keep one owner, because shared thinking does not mean shared accountability. When researchers studied cross-functional teams, three in four missed on budget, schedule, or goals, and the cause was that nobody was singularly accountable. Make it safe to disagree, or you have compliance and apathy instead of collaboration. And end with a decision and a handoff. Who owns it now?

That is Peopleship℠, shaping how people experience work so they bring their best thinking to it. 

Start With Yourself 

The Helm Method℠ always starts with your intention, which means it starts with you. Let's apply it to Delegation and Collaboration.

AIM. Before you decide anything about the work, notice your own pull. When you think about handing this off, what happens? Does it feel like relief because you never wanted the work? Do you tense up because letting go feels like losing control?
If collaboration feels like the better fit, is that because you have something to contribute, or because you are afraid to release it?

• Notice the reaction. It is already shaping how you lead.
• Then set the intention: how do I want to lead this? Name it.

ACT. If you are delegating, hand over the task and the decision. Talk about outcomes. Envision it together. Encourage questions. Get clear on the why, the constraints, the timeline, the resources, and what done looks like. If it is too nebulous to define at the start, agree on decision gates where you check progress together. They own the outcome. You are there for support, and you always have their back.
Two ways this goes wrong:

• Dumping: limited context, no authority, and a leader who reappears at the end asking what they were thinking.
• Hovering: a leader who says they handed it over but directs every small move, so the team never learns to own anything.

ADJUST. Not a checkpoint at the end. You stay present and monitor the whole way, at appropriate intervals, and you adjust with grace. When something is off track, use it to coach and correct. When the outcome still is not what you wanted, step back and look at the contributing factors. Delegation is a learning process for both of you. Your team gets stronger as you hand them more room, more flexibility, and more feedback. When you celebrate them for handling it well, other people pay attention.

Want to learn more and get a list of 3 things you can try this week?  Watch the Lesson: Why You’re Busier Than Your Team (It’s a Delegation Trap) 

This is part of the Leading Alongside AI series & it is free as part of our Mini but Mighty℠ Leadership Lessons on YouTube @bossatthehelm.

Next Friday we go into cross-functional collaboration, which is one of the clearest ways you show leadership to the senior and executive team in your company.  Subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any episodes.

 Lead yourself. Then lead others. Be a Boss.

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If your managers need help learning to delegate (to AI or people), we scale delegation, collaboration, and Human Intelligence skills across whole manager populations through workshops, online courses, and the Helm Leadership Essentials℠ cohort program. Reach out: [email protected].