How to Delegate Effectively 🤝
Practical advice to do it well.
There is a saying about management that goes: just hire the best people and get out of the way.
But get out of what, exactly?
The problem with such advice is that it assumes that delegation is binary: you either let people do the whole thing, or you will step onto their toes and prevent them from reaching their full potential.
The real world is, of course, more nuanced than this.
The best managers I know don’t simply choose to delegate something: they design how delegation works like they would with a process, or a system.
Delegation is often portrayed as a simple choice, while it is, in fact, a skill. And a tough one.
There is no standard playbook for delegating stuff, because each situation is unique, based on project and people:
🔨 Project — each project has peculiar goals, constraints, and requirements.
🙋♀️ People — each person has their own set of skills, strengths, and weaknesses.
This article wants to be a primer on how to delegate tasks effectively.
As with many management topics, this is part science, part art. The goal of this piece is to illustrate solid principles and techniques, to help you find your own style.
We will cover:
🪴 Benefits of delegation — why you should replace yourself continuously.
🔍 What you should delegate — spoiler: it’s more than you think.
🤝 How to delegate effectively — the three key elements.
➡️ How to get started — a simple process to get the ball rolling.
💡 Tips and mental models — memorable ideas and techniques you can use.
Let’s go!
🪴 Benefits of delegation
Without delegation, teams simply cannot grow their output — both in quantity and quality.
📏 Quantity
Delegation enables the distribution of tasks across more people. When you hire and onboard someone, you delegate tasks to them in order to:
invest more time/skills on such tasks, and
free up someone else’s time, to be spent on something else
Without this, you literally cannot scale.
💎 Quality
Delegation doesn’t only increase output, it also generates more value out of people, both for delegators and delegates.
Delegators — optimize the use of their time, routing it to tasks where they can bring the most value.
Delegates — grow professionally by taking on challenging tasks. Delegation is a form of sponsorship, which is a key engine for growth.
🔍 What you should delegate
One of the most popular approaches to delegation is the Eisenhower matrix, which buckets your tasks into four quadrants, based on two coordinates: urgency and importance.
The matrix advices to address tasks in various ways based on the quadrant they are in, and, in particular, it suggests delegating those that are urgent + not important.
Now, while such advice has merits, personally I have found it hard to follow in real life, for two reasons:
Urgent tasks — are often hard to delegate. Delegation is a long-term play; in the short-term it may require more time/effort than doing the thing yourself.
Non-important tasks — are ok, but they are often trivial, so if you only delegate those, you are limiting people’s growth. It doesn’t help that non-important tasks are also often small, which makes the ROI of delegation dubious.
Emanuele Blanco, Director of Engineering at Wise, weighed in on this:
One framework which helped me in deciding what to delegate is the Eisenhower Matrix - with a catch that I reflect a bit on what's "less important" and whether that really needs to be done, or not. Otherwise — especially if you delegate to people who report to you — you risk to delegate mostly mundane tasks, which can be demotivating for the folks on the receiving side.
Hovhannes Guylan, Senior EM at Avantida by e2open, also adds:
When a task takes you up to 5 minutes to handle by yourself, it's challenging to build the habit of involving other people or passing it to them. In the short-term, it will take others several hours, and quality of work will be lower than what a more experienced person can do.
So, I feel like Eisenhower Matrix is just tactical advice — incomplete at best.
Instead, there are three angles I use to look at things from a more strategic perspective. Ask yourself these questions:
🌟 Unique value — Where is your time spent best? What is the unique value you bring to the table? Are you spending enough time on it?
🎓 Skills — Are there people better equipped than you at handling some of your tasks?
🌱 Growth — Are there people who are eager to learn how to do some of the things you do?
My rule of thumb is: if at least two out of these three items drive you away from a task, you should probably delegate it.
As you see, these have nothing to do with urgency / importance — but that doesn’t mean those have no effect on delegation. In fact, I have found that you can draw a path on the Eisenhower matrix, that goes from the easiest + least valuable to delegate, to the hardest + most valuable 👇