Delegate, Don’t Abdicate: A Simple Actionable Framework

3 easy steps to delegate like a pro

As a leader you might have faced this problem in the past — your group starts growing and you find yourself overwhelmed with the sheer number of things that need to be tracked.

You hear advice about effective delegating to create more leaders in your group and free up some of your time to do strategic thinking. But somehow with a dark twist of fate, you become more overwhelmed and frustrated as things you delegated start falling apart. The advice that was supposed to help you starts creating more burden.

One of the ways to handle this situation is to do what other managers do — blame teammates for their lack of competence and readiness to handle the delegated tasks.

You wouldn’t be more wrong if you did that.

I’ve hardly seen cases where teammates weren’t ready to take on more responsibility. Most of the time, the problem is rooted in the manager’s understanding of delegation.

There, I said it.

There are two common types of delegation that I’ve done myself, or see other managers do.

You either delegate and then forget about it as you completely trust your teammate to do the right thing (abdication). Or you delegate…