As I transitioned to management, one of the core skills I had to learn was delegation. As an anxious person who was deeply involved in every aspect of project work, it wasn’t immediately clear how to let go without feeling like I was either micromanaging or setting my team up for failure. Over time, I discovered that effective delegation is about striking the right balance: providing enough structure to guide your team while giving them room to grow and learn on their own.
The Art of Delegation
Delegation is more than just handing off tasks; it has to be a deliberate exercise. Remember, delegation without structure is abdication
I’ve learned to avoid two common pitfalls:
- Over-Structuring (Micromanaging): If I break down a task too much, it leaves my team with an overly simplistic scope that doesn’t challenge them or foster learning.
- Over-Ambiguity: On the other hand, if the task is too vague, my team members can feel lost and may end up making avoidable mistakes.
The key is to define a problem with just enough detail to provide clarity while still leaving room for my team to innovate and expand their skills. In doing so, I not only help them grow but also gradually reduce the amount of time I need to invest in detailed instructions.
Delegation Framework
After an instance where I assigned a task that was too challenging without enough guidance—I developed a framework to streamline my delegation process. I break it down into five levels from the perspective of the delegator:
- L0: Do It Yourself
- L1: Review, Design & Execution Plan Needed
- L2: Review & Design Needed
- L3: Review Needed
- L4: Autonomous
The task is handled entirely by you—no delegation needed. Don’t skip this step. If you can’t do it yourself, then there’s no way you can guide them through the process.
For beginners, you provide a detailed design and execution plan, then review their work closely.
As your team member gains experience, they can take on the execution plan, though you still provide them with a design and provide review.
At this stage, your team member is handling design and execution almost independently, but you perform a final review to catch any oversights.
With proven competence, the team member operates independently, handling all aspects from design to execution and review.
The goal is to assign tasks based on your team member’s current abilities and gradually increase their responsibility. By doing this in a structured way, they can focus on learning a few skills and get repeated exposure to make it a habit. Once someone reaches L4 in a given area, you can scale up the complexity or scope of their projects.
A Practical Example: Building a Bike Business
To illustrate, consider the scenario of starting a custom bike shop:
- L0: You build bikes yourself in your garage.
- L1: When you make your first hire—someone who has little to no knowledge about bikes—you provide a detailed guide: describe the specs, list the parts, and outline a step-by-step build process while reviewing their work.
- L2: As your hire becomes more experienced, they can assemble bikes from a basic set of instructions. However, they might not yet understand how each part affects the overall performance and the trade-offs (e.g wide tire or slim tire).
- L3: After a year, your hire understands the trade-offs between bike components and can work more independently, though periodic reviews are still necessary.
- L4: With several years of experience, your hire is proficient enough to self-review and even mentor newer employees.
When your business expands—say you’re processing hundreds of orders and opening a new location—you might promote this experienced hire to manage the original shop. With increased scope they will need guidance on broader aspects of the business like supply and cost management, initiating a new cycle of delegation and learning.
Back to Engineering
The same delegation principles apply in engineering projects.
Here’s how I define the deliverables and responsibilities of execution plan, engineering design, and review. The expectations for each might need to be adjusted for different use cases, but it’s important to clearly define the expectation so you can evaluate and provide the report with a clear picture of what you’re looking for.
I won’t provide an example of what each of these look like since you can get a fairly good answer from ChatGPT from the below example project.
Example project: create a new feature that involves integrating billing with Stripe. There is a UI on our website that details the SaaS plans that we provide and depending on those we would bill the user to Stripe on a monthly basis
Execution Plan
Objective: Ensure clarity in deadlines and streamline the development process.
Key Elements:
- Estimate the time from start to launch.
- Identify opportunities for parallel work if additional engineers join.
- Spot risks and unknowns early.
- Track progress against deadlines.
- Plan for safe deployments with rollback options.
- Set up post-deployment metrics for tracking bugs.
Engineering Design
Objective: Achieve simplicity in execution—both short term and long term.
Key Elements:
- Clearly state the problem and its urgency.
- Identify the key challenges.
- Define stakeholder roles (inform, input, or action required).
- Propose a high-level solution understandable to all stakeholders.
- Detail the implementation steps and explain why this solution was chosen over others.
- Highlight both immediate and long-term risks.
- Incorporate stakeholder reviews.
- Outline an execution plan that aligns with the design.
Review
Objective: Mitigate risks by ensuring that all aspects of the project are sound before moving forward.
Key Elements:
- Confirm that solving the problem is critical.
- Validate that the chosen design is feasible and efficient.
- Ensure that the project is adequately staffed.
- Verify that the right stakeholders are involved.
- Check that the trade-offs are appropriate.
- Confirm that both short-term and long-term risks have been addressed. Pay special attention to preemptive decisions that are hard to reverse
Final Thoughts
My transition to management has been a journey of learning to trust my team by finding the balance between guidance and autonomy. This is not blind trust! It’s earned and well respected.
A structured approach to delegation not only fosters individual growth but also leads to a more efficient and empowered team. By gradually increasing responsibility—one degree at a time—we have a systematic approach to up-leveling the team.