I have this list. It’s a list of leadership merit badges. You acquire one of these badges when you complete a task that requires significant leadership. Acquiring the badge is the least important thing. The most important thing is that you discover the lesson that awards it.
As you might expect from the structure of this book, there are three classes of badges: ones earned from the tactics of being a manager, ones earned from your strategic stylings as a director, and, finally, the slippery merit badges associated with your visionary quest as an executive.
Where can you find the complete list of merit badges? Sorry, that’s another book. For now, here at the beginning of Act II, I’m just going to tell you about one of them. It’s the most important leadership merit badge, regardless of role: Delegation.
Let’s start with a definition. Delegate. Verb. Entrust (a task or responsibility) to another person, typically one who is less senior than oneself. The key word in that definition is “entrust,” but before we unpack that let’s first step back in time to those heady first days as a manager.
Perhaps the most confusing part of the early days of leadership is the shift in responsibility. You had something that you were responsible for: an area, a feature, a technology…but now it’s more. Your responsibility encompasses all of the responsibilities of all the folks on your team. As I wrote in Chapter 9, your instinct in these early days is that all the work of all your team members is your responsibility, which, while partly true, is a slippery slope.
It is true that if something were to go sideways with one of your teams, leadership will be staring at you and looking for answers. When they’re staring, it sure feels like you’re responsible. But a far more productive mindset is that you’re accountable.
While accountability implies responsibility, there’s an important distinction: accountability requires a willingness or obligation to justify (account for) actions and decisions. This means when it goes sideways and everyone’s staring at you, you need to be able to explain both how you got there and what is going to be done to fix it. How do you know these things? Your team has already told you…voluntarily.
When things go sideways, when the sky falls, you’ll rush to find the humans who know about the problem area. They know you’re in a dire situation and they know you are moving with great urgency. They have a professional irrational fear and they are listening to every single word you say.
At this moment, a manager who believes they are solely responsible for this situation will say “I” a lot. They are going to ask penetrating questions that indicate it’s their problem to solve because important people are asking them hard questions. They feel responsible, and hidden between the words they use and tucked nefariously behind the questions they ask is the distinct impression that they believe If I were the engineer running this, we would’ve never ended up in this situation.
Watch trust erode.
The reason Delegation is the most important merit badge is that earning it means you’ve learned important leadership lessons that will allow you to accelerate your leadership journey.
Your VP gives you a new project. It’s work that you, as an individual, have done many times. It’d be a slam-dunk project if you were doing it solo, but you’re a director with no time to code, so you hand the project to one of your managers, Julie.
At your 1:1 with Julie, you explain the project. You walk her through what winning looks like with this project, you talk resourcing, and you talk scheduling. Julie has never done anything like this, so she asks lots of questions. You have, so you’re able to give complete and informed answers. Julie scribbles your answers down and asks more questions. She’s learning.
Thirty days into the 90-day project, you’re hearing some concerns from the team on how this project is going. You mention to Julie that you’d like to discuss the project’s status at your next 1:1. She comes prepared. She’s heard the worry too, and has ideas on how to address the concerns.
Her ideas are well intentioned, but wrong. This is fine. She’s never done this before. You discuss a different direction. She’s quiet because she now understands her intuition was wrong, but your reasoning seems sound. She asks questions, which indicates she’s adjusting her mindset.
As the project winds down, it’s clear the final product is a B. It functions, schedules were met, but there are going to be performance issues with it shortly that require another month of unplanned work before the next release. It’s a B.
A little voice in your head says, “If it had been me banging on the keyboard, it’d be an A.” Shush, little voice. Allow me to tell you why a B in this case is credible leadership.
First, Julie knew this project was going to be a stretch for her and the team because they’d never done anything like it. You demonstrated trust by giving them this work, even though everyone knew it was beyond their means.
Second, when the project got bumpy, you didn’t overreact. You sought understanding, and you coached them through it by telling them stories of the time you did this work. More trust.
Third, you’ve learned a valuable set of lessons on how to not be a micromanager. You gave Julie lots of initial guidance, you answered her questions, and then you let her and her team run with it. When it went sideways, you didn’t punish, you coached.
Fourth, they did it. They completed the project. They delivered it and earned valuable experience in doing so. How’d it go for you the first time you did this type of work? I know I likely screwed it up in heretofore unimaginable ways. In this situation, you’ve increased the probability that the next project done by this leader and this team has every chance of being an A.
The complete delegation of familiar work to another human is a clear vote of confidence in their ability, which is one essential way of forming trust within a team. Letting go of doing the hands-on work is a tricky and nonobvious win, but as a leader, you build yourself by building others.
Another reason Delegation remains my essential leadership merit badge is because it is a skill that scales. You’ll need one version of it as a manager and you’ll need another as a director. Even better, the more advanced versions of delegation require the development of advanced skills on your side.
Here’s an excerpt from a leadership career path I wrote at a prior company. This is how I describe the act of delegation at different levels of experience:
Manager: Identifies and delegates small, well-defined projects to individuals within the team who require significant oversight.
Sr. Manager: Identifies and delegates significant projects to individuals within the team who require some oversight.
Director: Identifies and delegates large projects to teams or individuals who require little oversight.
Sr. Director: Identifies and delegates large and complex projects to teams or individuals who require little oversight.
Executive: Identifies and delegates large and complex projects to cross-functional internal or external teams that require little oversight.
You can see the three skills that you are developing as you grow as a leader:
Measuring the amount of oversight provided to the team/individual
Assessing the magnitude and complexity of projects
Considering the composition and size of teams capable of doing the work
A common complaint I hear about managers is the classic, “What do they do all day?” You know what a good manager is doing? They’re giving away just about everything that lands on their plate to members of their team because their job isn’t building the product, their job is building a team that is capable of building the product.
It’s confusing and challenging because you’re giving away the work that likely made you…you. That work you did gave you the experience to become a better leader. Delegation isn’t just how you’ll scale yourself—it’s how you’ll build leadership within your team.