The Modern Leader
Coming in strong this morning with the dramatics with the subject of this lesson.
Delegation is one of the areas I see rising EMs (i.e. those who moved from IC to EM) struggle with the most, especially early on in their career as an EM and if they moved up in the ranks of their original team. There are two things I see happen:
- You don’t delegate enough (e.g. “I can just get this done myself much faster”), or
- You try to delegate too much.
Delegating effectively is going to look different from one leader to the next based on your company’s expectations of you (e.g. are you still coding while also managing some folks?), your team’s skillset, and prioritization of work.
But what if they mess up? Won’t it look bad on me? Nope - and you shouldn’t be uncomfortable every time you delegate. Delegating means you’re putting the trust in the employee to complete the work, but you don’t control what actually gets done – and this is a very important point. Delegation is one of the best opportunities to level up your team, but this means they will also mess up. They’re also most likely not going to do the work the same way you may have. Let them do it their own way and maybe get it wrong. Let them learn from their mistakes.
To avoid confusion and possibly prevent getting the task, wrong, make sure you give as much context as possible to complete the task. This includes any details or background about the work, the due date, expectations, the desired outcome, and perhaps guidance on how they can get the work done. Invest time in training your team to be able to take on these tasks. Don’t just assign someone a task in Jira and expect them to figure it out on their own. You wouldn’t want to be set up for failure.
Lastly – and this is SO important – please give credit where credit’s due. If you delegate a task to one of your team members and they do a phenomenal job, make sure they get the recognition for that work.