BarcelonaDelegating well is the six pack of business management: highly desired and more difficult to achieve the older you get. In theory, entrusting the right decisions to people lower on the corporate ladder means greater satisfaction everywhere. Bosses have more time to focus on the problems that really deserve their attention. Middle managers and workers have a greater sense of autonomy. And the organization benefits from faster decision-making by the people best informed about the issue at hand. But in practice, delegating is a minefield.
Some bosses don’t even try. Maybe they distrust the people below them or maybe they want to control everything. Their professional success may have simply persuaded them of their own genius. But there are also kinder explanations. Startup founders are conditioned to do it all, at least until the companies reach a certain size. Many managers do more than they should to protect their teams from overload.
Other managers do delegate, but for the wrong reasons. Studies suggest that people are likely to delegate when decisions are difficult, when the consequences affect others, and when they want to avoid being blamed for a possible bad outcome. In a 2016 paper by Northeastern University’s Mary Steffel and co-authors, volunteers were asked to reserve hotel rooms for a conference, either for their own use or for their boss, and asked if they would like to book the rooms themselves or delegate the task to an office manager. When head picks and hotels were complicated, people tended to hand the job off to the hapless office manager.
A new study, by Victor Maas and Bei Shi of the Amsterdam Business School, confirms this. He found that people were more likely to delegate jobs to subordinates when the performance goals for that particular task were demanding, and they were much happier to keep tasks with goals that were easier to achieve. If a habitual micromanager unexpectedly asks you to take the lead on something, run away!
The vast majority of managers fall into a grayer area. They may be full of good intentions to leave the decisions to others, but they still have a hard time doing so. What if you trust your team members, but then you discover that you don’t like the decisions they make? What if you want to delegate some decisions, but you know your own bosses will hold you personally accountable? These problems can easily give rise to false autonomy, a version of delegation in which managers do not let their teams continue with tasks or subordinates use their freedom only to guess what they would like in their heads.
One way to navigate these issues is to use an explicit decision-making framework that attempts to make clear who is ready for what. These frames are not perfect. Project managers often use something called the RACI model. The first two letters classify those who are “responsible” from those who are “must answer”, a distinction that normal people may find “confusing” and “incomprehensible.” There are other clearer frames available. They have punchy names like DACI, DARE, and DICE: You might choose a cloud computing vendor, but you’ll feel a little like you’re in the special forces.
In addition to knowing who does what, it is useful to have a way to analyze what types of decisions can be delegated and which cannot. Before Jeff Bezos started hanging out in space suits and doing laughable photo shoots in Vogue, liked to articulate his management philosophy in annual letters to Amazon shareholders. In 2015 he made a useful distinction between type 1 decisions (“one-way doors”), which are important and irreversible, and type 2 decisions (“two-way doors”), which can be reversed if they don’t work. Type 1 decisions justify slow, deliberative processes; Type 2 decisions should be made quickly by smaller groups. Having a decision theory improves choices about what to delegate and reduces the chance of regrets.
Delegating well also requires a lot of judgment. Delegation is not all or nothing. An indifferent head can be as demotivating as a micromanager; it is necessary to be informed of decisions and, at times, to ignore them. But controlling at the right cadence and letting people proceed with decisions you wouldn’t have made yourself requires self-control and discipline. Just like those abs.
2023-12-16 19:26:25
#difficult #art #delegation
